George Bernard Shaw a penn State Electronic Classics Series Publication

Evil in the Throne of Good
This distress of the gentle was so acute that those who shared
it in civil life, without having to shed blood with their own
hands, or witness destruction with their own eyes, hardly

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Heartbreak House
care to obtrude their own woes. Nevertheless, even when
sitting at home in safety, it was not easy for those who had to
write and speak about the war to throw away their highest
conscience, and deliberately work to a standard of inevitable
evil instead of to the ideal of life more abundant. I can an-
swer for at least one person who found the change from the
wisdom of Jesus and St. Francis to the morals of Richard III
and the madness of Don Quixote extremely irksome. But
that change had to be made; and we are all the worse for it,
except those for whom it was not really a change at all, but
only a relief from hypocrisy.
Think, too, of those who, though they had neither to write
nor to fight, and had no children of their own to lose, yet
knew the inestimable loss to the world of four years of the
life of a generation wasted on destruction. Hardly one of the
epoch-making works of the human mind might not have
been aborted or destroyed by taking their authors away from
their natural work for four critical years. Not only were
Shakespeares and Platos being killed outright; but many of
the best harvests of the survivors had to be sown in the bar-
ren soil of the trenches. And this was no mere British con-
sideration. To the truly civilized man, to the good European,
the slaughter of the German youth was as disastrous as the
slaughter of the English. Fools exulted in “German losses.”
They were our losses as well. Imagine exulting in the death
of Beethoven because Bill Sykes dealt him his death blow!