George Bernard Shaw a penn State Electronic Classics Series Publication

The Dumb Capables and the Noisy Incapables
Confronted with this picture of insensate delusion and folly,
the critical reader will immediately counterplead that En-
gland all this time was conducting a war which involved the
organization of several millions of fighting men and of the
workers who were supplying them with provisions, muni-
tions, and transport, and that this could not have been done
by a mob of hysterical ranters. This is fortunately true. To
pass from the newspaper offices and political platforms and
club fenders and suburban drawing-rooms to the Army and
the munition factories was to pass from Bedlam to the busi-
est and sanest of workaday worlds. It was to rediscover En-
gland, and find solid ground for the faith of those who still
believed in her. But a necessary condition of this efficiency
was that those who were efficient should give all their time
to their business and leave the rabble raving to its heart’s
content. Indeed the raving was useful to the efficient, be-
cause, as it was always wide of the mark, it often distracted
attention very conveniently from operations that would have
been defeated or hindered by publicity. A precept which I
endeavored vainly to popularize early in the war, “If you have

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22
Heartbreak House
anything to do go and do it: if not, for heaven’s sake get out
of the way,” was only half carried out. Certainly the capable
people went and did it; but the incapables would by no means
get out of the way: they fussed and bawled and were only
prevented from getting very seriously into the way by the
blessed fact that they never knew where the way was. Thus
whilst all the efficiency of England was silent and invisible,
all its imbecility was deafening the heavens with its clamor
and blotting out the sun with its dust. It was also unfortu-
nately intimidating the Government by its blusterings into
using the irresistible powers of the State to intimidate the
sensible people, thus enabling a despicable minority of would-
be lynchers to set up a reign of terror which could at any
time have been broken by a single stern word from a respon-
sible minister. But our ministers had not that sort of cour-
age: neither Heartbreak House nor Horseback Hall had bred
it, much less the suburbs. When matters at last came to the
looting of shops by criminals under patriotic pretexts, it was
the police force and not the Government that put its foot
down. There was even one deplorable moment, during the
submarine scare, in which the Government yielded to a child-
ish cry for the maltreatment of naval prisoners of war, and,
to our great disgrace, was forced by the enemy to behave
itself. And yet behind all this public blundering and miscon-
duct and futile mischief, the effective England was carrying
on with the most formidable capacity and activity. The os-
tensible England was making the empire sick with its incon-
tinences, its ignorances, its ferocities, its panics, and its end-
less and intolerable blarings of Allied national anthems in
season and out. The esoteric England was proceeding irre-
sistibly to the conquest of Europe.