George Bernard Shaw a penn State Electronic Classics Series Publication

Nature’s Long Credits
Nature’s way of dealing with unhealthy conditions is unfor-
tunately not one that compels us to conduct a solvent hy-
giene on a cash basis. She demoralizes us with long credits
and reckless overdrafts, and then pulls us up cruelly with
catastrophic bankruptcies. Take, for example, common do-
mestic sanitation. A whole city generation may neglect it
utterly and scandalously, if not with absolute impunity, yet
without any evil consequences that anyone thinks of tracing
to it. In a hospital two generations of medical students way
tolerate dirt and carelessness, and then go out into general
practice to spread the doctrine that fresh air is a fad, and
sanitation an imposture set up to make profits for plumbers.
Then suddenly Nature takes her revenge. She strikes at the
city with a pestilence and at the hospital with an epidemic of
hospital gangrene, slaughtering right and left until the inno-
cent young have paid for the guilty old, and the account is
balanced. And then she goes to sleep again and gives another
period of credit, with the same result.
This is what has just happened in our political hygiene.
Political science has been as recklessly neglected by Govern-
ments and electorates during my lifetime as sanitary science
was in the days of Charles the Second. In international rela-
tions diplomacy has been a boyishly lawless affair of family
intrigues, commercial and territorial brigandage, torpors of
pseudo-goodnature produced by laziness and spasms of fe-
rocious activity produced by terror. But in these islands we
muddled through. Nature gave us a longer credit than she
gave to France or Germany or Russia. To British centenar-
ians who died in their beds in 1914, any dread of having to
hide underground in London from the shells of an enemy

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8
Heartbreak House
seemed more remote and fantastic than a dread of the ap-
pearance of a colony of cobras and rattlesnakes in Kensington
Gardens. In the prophetic works of Charles Dickens we were
warned against many evils which have since come to pass;
but of the evil of being slaughtered by a foreign foe on our
own doorsteps there was no shadow. Nature gave us a very
long credit; and we abused it to the utmost. But when she
struck at last she struck with a vengeance. For four years she
smote our firstborn and heaped on us plagues of which Egypt
never dreamed. They were all as preventable as the great
Plague of London, and came solely because they had not
been prevented. They were not undone by winning the war.
The earth is still bursting with the dead bodies of the victors.