“WHAT A WORLD!”

Dominion, Volume 27, Issue 35, 4 November 1933, Page 7

“WHAT A WORLD!”

Mr. G. B. Shaw and Rights of Women REPLY TO INVITATION By Telegraph.—Press Assn. —Copyright. London, November 2. A typical breezy correspondence has been published in which Mr. Bernard Shaw refuses to attend a meeting at Westminster to deal with the question “Should married women earn?” Mr. Shaw’s letter to Mrs. Pethick Lawrence says: “Nothing will induce me to speak at a meeting to demand rights for women. I have lost no opportunity of giving the cause a lift with my writings. Personal vanity will not allow me to be led in triumph by eloquent militant women, and exhibited peeping behind their skirts to speak out a little piece in favour of this or that concession, and then be patted on the head as a good little knight errant and sent home to bed. A pretty picture I would cut at seventy-seven demanding rights for married women. Besides the significance of the meeting would be entirely spoiled by the crowd that follows me everywhere, not caring two straws whether I am advocating purdah or promiscuity.” Mr. Shaw goes on to argue that much more important than adult suffrage was his earlier advocacy that there should be a proportion of women in every governing body. “Don’t Mussolini. Hitler, and Company make you think occasionally that I was right? We have now the spectacle of women’s votes keeping women out of Parliament. and the negro Republic of Liberia reviving the slave trade. What a world I” A “PEPPERY” POSTCARD Why he sent “a peppery postcard” to officials of the World Committee for the Relief of Victims of German Fascism was explained by Mr. G. Bernard Shaw recently. He said :— “People here get into a state of political agitation and take up the case of some prisoner or other accused by a foreign Government, and without the slightest consideration of the fact that they are damaging the unfortunate prisoner—never considering the effect of their proceedings on the prisoner in question. “Take tlie case of Sacco and Vanzetti. Any chance they had of not being electrocuted was cut off by foreign agitation got up denouncing American justice and that kind of thing. “A man named Mooney has been for many years in prison in America, and I dare say would have been let out long ago had he not been used as a stick to beat the American Government with. “Take the case, again, of the Russian engineers. Our agitation was ridiculous. We had no right to do it. Yet the people who took up that point of view most strongly are doing the very same thing in the case of these unfortunate Leipzig prisoners If we had anything to say we should wait until they have had their trial. Continually using these unfortunate prisoners abroad as a stick with which to beat a Government seems to be cruel and inconsiderate.”