Not Red

THE INTELLIGENT WOMAN'S GUIDE TO SOCIALISM AND CAPITALISM--Bernard Shaw--Brentano ($3.00).

Four hundred and seventy pages of text, 33 of table of contents, and five of foreword to American readers, comprise what G. B. S. is pleased to call his last will and testament to posterity. Such a document is often a summary of previous implications: and here are the echoes of many a famous "preface" concerning religion, eugenics, education, professional morality, economics--in short, society. But the echoes are measured and stressed in a grand symphony of discord for which the resolving chord is equality of income. The bizarre title of the composition is calculated to attract male attention: a man cannot confess his ignorance of politics, economics, and all the rest of a voter's business, but he does not object to elementary instruction offered his wife. And if the husband should overhear. . . . Shaw chuckles contentedly, and instructs:

Society is based upon the distribution of its wealth. To date, seven plans of distribution have been advocated:

1. "To each what she produces" seems fair enough, until the impossibility of ascertaining the amount each produces proves the plan nonsensical.

2. "To each what she deserves" is equally absurd because merit cannot be measured by money,

3. "To each what she can grab," a plan still tolerated in business, is not only amoral, but even among pirates found impracticable.

4. "To the many as little as possible, and the rest to the few" has no longer its one justification of providing capital, as capital can now be provided in less abusive ways.

5. "To each class of society a fixed amount, according to scale" provides more of course, for the bank president than for the street scavenger, but the impossibility of gauging just how much more vitiates the plan.

6. "To let things slide" sets up a disastrous strain unless legislation keeps pace with sliding (change), the law of nature.

7. "To each an equal income"--the object of socialism--is the only remaining possibility.

Every known economic scheme but socialism being convincingly wiped out by stultification in the best Shavian manner, the author then proceeds to establish the necessity, the practicability, of socialism--originating not so much with the Proletariat (the Third International is damned along with Capitalism), but with the great middle class (Fabianism). When with logic and concrete example, he has demonstrated the practicability of gradual nationalization of income, he shows that the great deterrent is not practical but metaphysical : the will to equality.

But Shaw's rationale, his passionate plea, his drole cajolery, will do much to arouse that will-to-equality, and even more to stimulate women, and their men, toward intelligent consideration of some solution, whether it be socialism, or some other ism.