My old Independent Theatre manager, Mr Grein, besides that reproach to me for shattering his ideals, complains that Mrs Warren is not wicked enough, and names several romancers who would have clothed her black soul with all the terrors of tragedy.  I have no doubt they would; but if you please, my dear Grein, that is just what I did not want to do.  Nothing would please our sanctimonious British public more than to throw the whole guilt of Mrs Warren’s profession on Mrs Warren herself.  Now the whole aim of my play is to throw that guilt on the British public itself.  You may remember that when you produced my first play, Widowers’ Houses, exactly the same misunderstanding arose.  When the virtuous young gentleman rose up in wrath against the slum landlord, the slum landlord very effectively shewed him that slums are the product, not of individual Harpagons, but of the indifference of virtuous young gentlemen to the condition of the city they live in, provided they live at the west end of it on money earned by someone else’s labor.  The notion that prostitution is created by the wickedness of Mrs Warren is as silly as the notion—­prevalent, nevertheless, to some extent in Temperance circles—­that drunkenness is created by the wickedness of the publican.  Mrs Warren is not a whit a worse woman than the reputable daughter who cannot endure her.  Her indifference to the ultimate social consequences of her means of making money, and her discovery of that means by the ordinary method of taking the line of least resistance to getting it, are too common in English society to call for any special remark.  Her vitality, her thrift, her energy, her outspokenness, her wise care of her daughter, and the managing capacity which has enabled her and her sister to climb from the fried fish shop down by the Mint to the establishments of which she boasts, are all high English social virtues.  Her defence of herself is so overwhelming that it provokes the St James Gazette to declare that “the tendency of the play is wholly evil” because “it contains one of the boldest and most specious defences of an immoral life for poor women that has ever been penned.”  Happily the St James Gazette here speaks in its haste.  Mrs Warren’s defence of herself is not only bold and specious, but valid and unanswerable.  But it is no defence at all of the vice which she organizes.  It is no defence of an immoral life to say that the alternative offered by society collectively to poor women is a miserable life, starved, overworked, fetid, ailing, ugly.  Though it is quite natural and right for Mrs Warren to choose what is, according to her lights, the least immoral alternative, it is none the less infamous of society to offer such alternatives.  For the alternatives offered are not morality and immorality, but two sorts of immorality.  The man who cannot see that starvation, overwork, dirt, and disease are as anti-social as prostitution—­that they are the vices and crimes of a nation, and not merely its misfortunes—­is (to put it as politely as possible) a hopelessly Private Person.