SHAW, George Bernard (1856-1950). Playwright.
Autograph draft of a reply to Alfred Russel Wallace in connection with a dispute in the pages of The Clarion, 7 pages 4to in pencil, ca 1900. On separate sheets, with autograph revisions, deletions and corrections, rectos only, evidently removed from a notebook.

'No man less clever than Alfred Russel Wallace could have written so aggravating a reply as that with which he has fobbed me off. ... since Professor Wallace is under no suspicion of intellectual incapacity, I ask him what he means in treating me in this fashion. Natural selection on which a dozen different meanings might be forced without that doing the English language any violence. ... What would Professor Wallace say to me if I met his essays on Natural Selection & vaccination by showing that it was possible to misunderstand them. ... President Kruger has left them [Socialists] no excuse for misunderstanding him. In his Blomfontein Conference with Sir Alfred Milner, he said & repeated that our demands seemed to him just as if the people working on his farm had demanded that they should receive the title deeds (pure Socialism, observe). Any Socialist would have closed with him on that & told him that transfer of title deeds from the owner to the worker was exactly what the twentieth century was going to mean, and that any ruler who thought he could treat a country as "my land"... & its inhabitants as his farm servants, would go down before the march of social evolution. ...'

Alfred Russel Wallace (1823-1913), naturalist, explorer, geographer, anthropologist and biologist, proposed the principle of natural selection independently of Charles Darwin.
[No: 24678]