On His Seventieth Birthday
乔治·萧伯纳 / George Bernard Shaw
乔治·萧伯纳（1856—1950），爱尔兰作家、戏剧家和政论家，出身于都柏林一个公务员之家，曾当过抄写员、会计，赴伦敦后开始从事创作。1925年获诺贝尔文学奖，他的主要作品有《巴巴拉上校》《苹果车》《圣女贞德》等。
Ace in the Hole
Understand these new words before you read this article.
1. constitutional adj. 宪法规定的，合乎宪法的；宪法的；体质上的，生来的
2. compromisen. 妥协，折中方法
3. capitalism n．资本主义(制度)；资本(或财富)的拥有；资本(私人占有和生产盈利)的支配地位
4. promulgate v. 宣扬(某事物)；传播；公布，颁布(法令、新法律等)
5. absurdity n. 极端无理性，悖理；荒谬；谬论；荒谬的行为
Of late years the public have been trying to tackle me in every way they possibly can, and failing to make anything of it they have turned to treating me as a great man. This is a dreadful fate to overtake anybody. There has been a distinct attempt to do it again now, and for that reason I absolutely decline to say anything about the celebration of my seventieth birthday. But when the Labor Party, my old friends the Labor Party, invited me here, I knew that I should be all right.
Now, however, we have built up a Constitutional Party. We have built it up on a socialistic basis. My friend, Mr. Sidney Webb, Mr. Macdonald and myself said definitely at the beginning that what we had got to do was to make the Socialist Party a constitutional party to which any respectable God-fearing man could belong without the slightest compromise of his respectability. We got rid of all those traditions that is why Governments in the present day are more afraid of us than they were of any of the Radical people.
Our position is a perfectly simple one and we have the great advantage of understanding our position. We oppose socialism to capitalism.
According to the capitalists, there will be a guarantee to the world that every man in the country would get a job. They didn’t contend it would be a well-paid job, because if it was well paid a man would save up enough one week to stop working the next week, and they were determined to keep a man working the whole time on a bare subsistence wage—and, on the other hand, divide an accumulation of capital.
They said capitalism not only secured this for the working man, but, by insuring fabulous wealth in the hands of a small class of people, they would save money whether they liked it or not and would have to invest it. That is capitalism, and this Government is always interfering with capitalism. Instead of giving a man a job or letting him starve they are giving him doles after making sure he has paid for them first. They are giving capitalists subsidies and making all sorts of regulations that are breaking up their own system. All the time they are doing it, and we are telling them it is breaking up, they don’t understand.
We say in criticism of capitalism: Your system has never kept its promises for one single day since it was p romulgated. Our production is ridiculous. We are producing eighty horsepower motor cars when many more houses should be built. We are producing most extravagant luxuries while children starve. You have stood production on its head. Instead of beginning with the things the nation needs most, you are beginning at just the opposite end. We say distribution has become so glaringly ridiculous that there are only two people out of the forty-seven million people in this country who approve of the present system of distribution one is the Duke of Northumberland and the other is Lord Banbury.
We are opposed to that theory. Socialism, which is perfectly clear and unmistakable, says the thing you have got to take care of is your distribution. We have to begin with that, and private property, if it stands in the way of good distribution, has got to go.
A man who holds public property must hold it on the pub1ic condition on which, for instance, I carry my walking stick. I am not allowed to do what I like with it. I must not knock you on the head with it. We say that if distribution goes wrong, everything else goes wrong—religion, morals, government. And we say, therefore (this is the whole meaning of our socialism), we must begin with distribution and take all the necessary steps.
