Chapter I: Part 1

FABIAN
ESSAYS IN SOCIALISM

BY

G. BERNARD SHAW
SIDNEY WEBB
WILLIAM CLARKE
SYDNEY OLIVIER
ANNIE BESANT
GRAHAM WALLAS

AND

HUBERT BLAND

EDITED BY
G. BERNARD SHAW

_With a new preface for this edition by Mr. Shaw_

BOSTON
THE BALL PUBLISHING CO.
1911

_Copyright, 1908_
BY GEORGE BERNARD SHAW

CONTENTS.

THE FABIAN SOCIETY AND ITS WORK.
BY WILLIAM CLARKE. Page xxiii.

THE BASIS OF SOCIALISM.

ECONOMIC BY G. BERNARD SHAW.

RENT. The Cultivation and Population of the Earth.--Economic
Origin of the County Family.--Economic Rent of Land and
Ability.--Tenant Right.--The Advent of the Proletarian. Page 1.

VALUE. Mechanism of Exchange.--Price and Utility.--Effects
of Supply.--Law of Indifference.--Total and Final Utility.--Relation
of Value to Cost of Production. Page 9.

WAGES. The Proletariat.--Sale of Labor.--Subsistence
Wage.--Capitalism.--Increase of Riches and Decrease of
Wealth.--Divorce of Exchange Value from Social Utility. Page 15.

CONCLUSION. Apparent Discrepancies between History and
Theory.--Socialism.--Pessimism and Private Property.--Economic
Soundness of Meliorism. Page 20.

HISTORIC BY SIDNEY WEBB, LL.B., BARRISTER AT LAW,
LECTURER ON POLITICAL ECONOMY AT THE CITY OF LONDON COLLEGE.

THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE DEMOCRATIC IDEAL. Ancestry of
English Socialism.--The Utopians.--Introduction of the Conception
of Evolution.--The Lesson of Democracy. Page 26.

THE DISINTEGRATION OF THE OLD SYNTHESIS. The Decay of
Medievalism.--The Industrial Revolution.--The French Revolution.--The
Progress of Democracy. Page 31.

THE PERIOD OF ANARCHY. Individualism.--Philosophic Radicalism
and _Laisser-faire_.--The Utilitarian Analysis. Page 35.

THE INTELLECTUAL AND MORAL REVOLT; AND ITS POLITICAL
OUTCOME. The Poets, Communists, Philosophers, Christian Socialists,
and Evolutionists.--The Extension of State Activity.--Existing State
Registration, Inspection, and Direct Organization of Labor.--The
Radical Programme. Page 40.

THE NEW SYNTHESIS. Evolution and the Social Organism.--Liberty
and Equality.--Social Health. Page 50.

INDUSTRIAL BY WILLIAM CLARKE, M.A., CAMBRIDGE.

THE SUPERSESSION OF INDIVIDUALIST PRODUCTION. The Cottage
Industry.--The Mechanical Inventions.--The Factory System. Page 56.

THE GROWTH OF THE GREAT INDUSTRY. The Expansion of Lancashire.--The
White Slavery.--State Interference. Page 65.

THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE WORLD-COMMERCE. The Triumph
of Free Trade.--The Fight for New Markets.--The Carriers of the
World. Page 71.

THE DIFFERENTIATION OF MANAGER AND CAPITALIST. The Rise
of Co-operation and the Joint Stock Company.--The “Ring” and the
“Trust.”--The Despotism of Capitalist Communism. Page 76.

MORAL BY SYDNEY OLIVIER, B.A., OXFORD.

THE EVOLUTION OF MORALITY. The Common End.--The Conditions
of Freedom.--The Individual and the Race.--The Growth of
Social Consciousness.--Convention and Law. Page 93.

PROPERTY AND MORALS. The Reaction of Property-Forms on Moral
Ideas.--Class Morality.--Negation of the Conditions of
Freedom.--Social Dissolution. Page 104.

THE RE-INTEGRATION OF SOCIETY. The Ordering of the Primary
Conditions.--The Idea of the Poor Law.--Secondary
Conditions.--Morality and Reason.--The Idea of the School. Page 112.

THE ORGANIZATION OF SOCIETY.

PROPERTY UNDER SOCIALISM. BY GRAHAM WALLAS, M.A., OXFORD.

VISIBLE WEALTH. Consumers’ Capital.--Producers’ Capital. Page 120.

DEBTS AND SERVICES. Deferred and Anticipated
Consumption.--Interest. Page 125.

IDEAS. Copyright and Patent Right.--Education. Page 132.

INDUSTRY UNDER SOCIALISM BY ANNIE BESANT.

THE ORGANIZATION OF LABOR. Rural.--Urban.--International. Page 136.

THE DISTRIBUTION OF THE PRODUCT. The Individual.--The
Municipality.--The State. Page 147.

SOCIAL SAFEGUARDS. The Stimulus to Labor.--The Provision
for Initiative.--The Reward of Excellence. Page 150.

THE TRANSITION TO SOCIAL DEMOCRACY.

TRANSITION BY G. BERNARD SHAW.

MEDIEVALISM TO CAPITALISM. The Old Order.--Merchant Adventurer,
Pirate, Slave-Trader, Capitalist.--The Old Order burst by the
New Growth.--Chaos. Page 157.

ANARCHY TO STATE INTERFERENCE. Political Economy.--Hegelian
Conception of the Perfect State.--Socialism: Its Practical
Difficulties.--Impracticability of Catastrophic Change.--Democracy
the Antidote to Bureaucracy.--The State Interferes. Page 160.

STATE INTERFERENCE TO STATE ORGANIZATION. Hard Times.--Revival of
Revolutionary Socialism.--Remaining Steps to the Consummation of
Democracy.--Machinery of Socialism.--Social Pressure.--Urban
Rents.--The New Taxation.--State Organization of Labor its
Indispensable Complement.--The Unemployed.--Solution of the
Compensation Difficulty.--Economic Reactions of the Progress
of Municipal Socialism.--Militant Socialism Abandoned but not
Dishonored. Page 169.

THE OUTLOOK BY HUBERT BLAND.

THE CONDITION OF ENGLISH PARTIES. The Lines of Progress.--The
Rate of Progress in Thought and Industry Compared with that in
Politics.--Alleged Disappearance of the Whig. Page 184.

THE SOCIALIZING OF POLITICS. Political Myopia.--Sham Socialism.--Red
Herrings.--Dreams of Permeating the Liberal
Party.--Disillusionment.--The New Departure. Page 189.

THE DUTIES OF THE HOUR. The True Line of Cleavage.--Hopes
and Fears.--The Solidarity of the Workers. Page 198.

INDEX. Page 203.

THE FABIAN SOCIETY AND ITS WORK.

PREFACE TO THE 1908 EDITION

Since 1889 the Socialist movement has been completely transformed throughout Europe; and the result of the transformation may fairly be described as Fabian Socialism. In the eighteen-eighties, when Socialism revived in England for the first time since the suppression of the Paris Commune in 1871, it was not at first realized that what had really been suppressed for good and all was the romantic revolutionary Liberalism and Radicalism of 1848, to which the Socialists had attached themselves as a matter of course, partly because they were themselves romantic and revolutionary, and partly because both Liberals and Socialists had a common object in Democracy.

Besides this common object the two had a common conception of method in revolution. They were both catastrophists. Liberalism had conquered autocracy and bureaucracy by that method in England and France, and then left industry to make what it could of the new political conditions by the unregulated action of competition between individuals. Briefly, the Liberal plan was to cut off the King’s head, and leave the rest to Nature, which was supposed to gravitate towards economic harmonies when not restrained by tyrannical governments. The Socialists were very far ahead of the Liberals in their appreciation of the preponderant importance of industry, even going so far as to maintain, with Buckle and Marx, that all social institutions whatever were imposed by economic conditions, and that there was fundamentally only one tyranny: the tyranny of Capital. Yet even the Socialists had so far formed their political habits in the Liberal school that they were quite disposed to believe that if you cut off the head of King Capital, you might expect to see things come right more or less spontaneously.

No doubt this general statement shews the Revolutionaries of 1848-71 as simpler than they appear on their own records. Proudhon was full of proposals: one of them, the minimum wage, turns out to be of the very first importance now that Mr. and Mrs. Sidney Webb have put the case for it on an invincible basis of industrial fact and economic theory. Lassalle really knew something of the nature of law, the practice of Government, and the mind of the governing classes. Marx, though certainly a bit of a Liberal fatalist (did he not say that force is the midwife of progress without reminding us that force is equally the midwife of chaos, and chaos the midwife of martial law?), was at all events no believer in _Laisser-faire_. Socialism involves the introduction of design, contrivance, and co-ordination, by a nation consciously seeking its own collective welfare, into the present industrial scramble for private gain; and as it is clear that this cannot be a spontaneous result of a violent overthrow of the existing order, and as the Socialists of 1848-71 were not blind, it would be impossible to substantiate a claim for Fabian Essays as the first text-book of Socialism in which catastrophism is repudiated as a method of Socialism.

Therefore we must not say that the Revolutionists and Internationalists of 1848-71 believed in a dramatic overthrow of the capitalist system in a single convulsion, followed by the establishment of a new heaven, a new earth, and a new humanity. They were visionaries, no doubt: all political idealists are; but they were quite as practical as the Conservatives and Liberals who now believe that the triumph of their party will secure the happiness and peace of the country. All the same, it was almost impossible to induce them to speak or think of the Socialist state of the future in terms of the existing human material for it. They talked of Communes, and, more vaguely and less willingly, of central departments to co-ordinate the activities of the Communes; but if you ventured to point out that these apparently strange and romantic inventions were simply city corporations under the Local Government Board, they vehemently repudiated such a construction, and accused you of reading the conditions of the present system into Socialism. They had all the old Liberal mistrust of governments and bureaucracy and all the old tendency of bourgeois revolutionists to idolize the working class. They had no suspicion of the extent to which the very existence of society depends on the skilled work of administrators and experts, or how much wisdom and strength of character is required for their control by popular representatives. They actually believed that when their efforts throughout Europe had demonstrated the economics of Socialism to the proletariats of the great capitals, the cry “Proletarians of all lands: unite,” would be responded to; and that Capitalism would fall before an International Federation of the working classes of Europe, not in the sense in which some future historian will summarize two or three centuries (in which sense they may prove right enough), but as an immediate practical plan of action likely to be carried through in twenty years by Socialist societies holding completely and disdainfully aloof from ordinary politics. In short, they were romantic amateurs, and, as such, were enormously encouraged and flattered when Marx and Engels insisted on the “scientific” character of their movement in contrast to the “Utopian” Socialism of Owen, Fourier, St. Simon, and the men of the 1820-48 phase. When the events of 1871 in Paris tested them practically, their hopeless public incapacity forced their opponents to exterminate them in the most appalling massacre of modern times--all the more ghastly because it was a massacre of the innocents.

Public opinion in Europe was reconciled to the massacre by the usual process of slandering the victims. Now had Europe been politically educated no slanders would have been necessary; for even had it been humanly possible that all the Federals mown down with mitrailleuses in Paris were incendiaries and assassins, it would still have been questionable whether indiscriminate massacre is the right way to deal with incendiaries and assassins. But there can be no question as to what must be done with totally incompetent governors. The one thing that is politically certain nowadays is that if a body of men upset the existing government of a modern state without sufficient knowledge and capacity to continue the necessary and honest part of its work, and if, being unable to do that work themselves, they will not let anyone else do it either, their extermination becomes a matter of immediate necessity. It will avail them nothing that they aim higher than their fathers did; that their intentions are good, their action personally disinterested, and their opponents selfish and venal routineers who would themselves be equally at a loss if they had to create a new order instead of merely pulling the wires of an old one. Anyone who looks at the portraits of the members of the Paris Commune can see at a glance that they compared very favorably in all the external signs of amiability and refinement with any governing body then or now in power in Europe. But they could not manage the business they took upon themselves; and Thiers could. Marx’s demonstration that they were heroes and martyrs and that Thiers and his allies were rascals did not help in the least, though it was undeniably the ablest document in the conflict of moral clap-trap that obscured the real issues--so able indeed as a piece of literature, that more than thirty years after its publication it struck down the Marquis de Gallifet as if it had appeared in the _Temps_ or _Débats_ of the day before. It was amiable of the Federals to be so much less capable of exterminating Thiers than he was of exterminating them; but sentimental amiability is not by itself a qualification for administering great modern States.

Now the Fabian Society, born in 1884, and reaching the age of discretion in less than two years, had no mind to be exterminated. Martyrdom was described by one of us as “the only way in which a man can become famous without ability.” Further, we had no illusions as to the treatment we should receive if, like the Paris Federals, we terrified the property classes before they were disabled by a long series of minor engagements. In Paris in 1871, ordinary sane people hid themselves in their houses for weeks under the impression that the streets were not safe: they did not venture out until they ran a serious risk of being shot at sight by their own partisans in the orgy of murder and cruelty that followed the discovery that the Commune could fight only as a rat fights in a corner. Human nature has not changed since then. In 1906 a Fabian essayist stood one May morning in the Rue de Rivoli, and found himself almost the only soul in the west end of Paris who dared appear there. The cultured inhabitants of that select quarter were hiding in their houses as before, with their larders full of hams and their baths full of live fish to provision them for a siege. There was much less danger of a revolution that day than there is of Primrose Hill becoming an active volcano at six o’clock this evening; and the purpose of the Government and its party newspapers in manufacturing the scare to frighten the bourgeoisie into supporting them at the general election just then beginning was obvious, one would have thought, to the dimmest political perspicacity. In the evening that same essayist, in the Place de la Révolution, saw a crowd of sightseers assembled to witness the promised insurrection, and the troops and the police assembled to save society from it. It was very like Trafalgar Square in 1887, when the same violent farce was enacted in London. Occasionally the troops rode down some of the sightseers and the police arrested some of them. Enough persons lost their temper to make a few feeble attempts at riot, and to supply arrests for the morning papers. Next day Society, saved, came out of its hiding places; sold the fish from its baths and the hams from its larders at a sacrifice (the weather being very hot and the hams in questionable condition); and voted gratefully for the government that had frightened it out of its senses with an imaginary revolution and a ridiculous “complot.” England laughed at the Parisians (though plenty of English visitors had left Paris to avoid the threatened Reign of Terror); yet in the very next month our own propertied classes in Cairo, terrified by the Nationalist movement in Egypt, fell into a paroxysm of cowardice and cruelty, and committed the Denshawai atrocity, compared to which the massacre of Glencoe was a trifle. The credulity which allows itself to be persuaded by reiteration of the pious word Progress that we live in a gentler age than our fathers, and that the worst extremities of terror and vengeance are less to be apprehended from our newly enriched automobilist classes than they were from the aristocracies of the older orders, is not a Fabian characteristic. The Fabian knows that property does not hesitate to shoot, and that now, as always, the unsuccessful revolutionist may expect calumny, perjury, cruelty, judicial and military massacre without mercy. And the Fabian does not intend to get thus handled if he can help it. If there is to be any shooting, he intends to be at the State end of the gun. And he knows that it will take him a good many years to get there. Still, he thinks he sees his way--or rather the rest of his way; for he is already well on the road.

It was in 1885 that the Fabian Society, amid the jeers of the catastrophists, turned its back on the barricades and made up its mind to turn heroic defeat into prosaic success. We set ourselves two definite tasks: first, to provide a parliamentary program for a Prime Minister converted to Socialism as Peel was converted to Free Trade; and second, to make it as easy and matter-of-course for the ordinary respectable Englishman to be a Socialist as to be a Liberal or a Conservative.

These tasks we have accomplished, to the great disgust of our more romantic comrades. Nobody now conceives Socialism as a destructive insurrection ending, if successful, in millennial absurdities. Membership of the Fabian Society, though it involves an express avowal of Socialism, excites no more comment than membership of the Society of Friends, or even of the Church of England. Incidentally, Labor has been organized as a separate political interest in the House of Commons, with the result that in the very next Budget it was confessed for the first time that there are unearned as well as earned incomes in the country; an admission which, if not a surrender of the Capitalist citadel to Socialism, is at all events letting down the drawbridge; for Socialism, on its aggressive side, is, and always has been, an attack on idleness. The resolution to make an end of private property is gathering force every day: people are beginning to learn the difference between a man’s property in his walking stick, which is strictly limited by the public condition that he shall not use it to break his neighbor’s head or extort money with menaces, and those private rights of property which enable the idle to levy an enormous tribute, amounting at present to no less than £630,000,000 a year, on the earnings of the rest of the community. The old attempt to confuse the issue by asserting that the existence of the family, religion, marriage, etc., etc., are inextricably bound up with the toleration of senseless social theft no longer imposes on anyone: after a whole year of unexampled exploitation of this particular variety of obscene vituperation by the most widely read cheap newspapers in London, no Socialist is a penny the worse for it.

The only really effective weapon of the press against Socialism is silence. Even Bishops cannot get reported when they advocate Socialism and tear to pieces the old pretence that political economy, science, and religion are in favor of our existing industrial system. Socialist speakers now find audiences so readily that, even with comparatively high charges for admission, large halls can be filled to hear them without resorting to the usual channels of advertisement. Their speeches are crammed with facts and figures and irresistible appeals to the daily experience and money troubles of the unfortunate ratepayers and rent-payers who are too harassed by money worries to care about official party politics; but not a word of these is allowed to leak through to the public through the ordinary channels of newspaper reporting. However, the conspiracy of silence has its uses to us. We have converted the people who have actually heard us. The others, having no news of our operations, have left us unmolested until our movement has secured its grip of the public. Now that the alarm has at last been given, nobody, it seems, is left in the camp of our enemies except the ignorant, the politically imbecile, the corruptly interested, and the retinue of broken, drunken, reckless mercenaries who are always ready to undertake a campaign of slander against the opponents of any vested interest which has a bountiful secret service fund. This may seem a strong thing to say; but it is impossible not to be struck by the feebleness and baseness of the opposition to Socialism to-day as compared with the opposition of twenty years ago. In the days when Herbert Spencer’s brightest pupils, from Mrs. Sidney Webb to Grant Allen, turned from him to the Socialism in which he could see nothing but “the coming slavery,” we could respect him whilst confuting him. To-day we neither respect our opponents nor confute them. We simply, like Mrs. Stetson Gillman’s prejudice slayer, “walk through them as if they were not there.”

Still, we do not affect to underrate the huge public danger of a press which is necessarily in the hands of the very people whose idleness and extravagance keep the nation poor and miserable in spite of its immense resources. It costs quarter of a million to start a London daily paper with any chance of success; and every man who writes for it risks his livelihood every time he pens a word that threatens the incomes of the proprietors and their class. The quantity of snobbish and anti-social public opinion thus manufactured is formidable; and a new sort of crime--the incitement by newspapers of mobs to outrage and even murder--hitherto tried only on religious impostors, is beginning to be applied to politics. The result is likely to be another illustration of the impossibility of combining individual freedom with economic slavery. We have had to throw freedom of contract to the winds to save the working classes from extermination as a result of “free” contracts between penniless fathers of starving families and rich employers. Freedom of the press is hardly less illusory when the press belongs to the slave owners of the nation, and not a single journalist is really free. We think it well therefore at this moment to warn our readers not to measure the extent of our operations or our influence, much less the strength of our case, by what they read of us in the papers. The taste for spending one’s life in drudgery and never-ending pecuniary anxiety solely in order that certain idle and possibly vicious people may fleece you for their own amusement, is not so widespread as the papers would have us think. Even that timidest of Conservatives, the middle class man with less than £500 a year (sometimes less than £100) is beginning to ask himself why his son should go, half-educated, to a clerk’s desk at fifteen, to enable another man’s son to go to a university and complete an education of which, as a hereditary idler, he does not intend to make use. To tell him that such self-questioning is a grave symptom of Free Love and Atheism may terrify him; but it does not convince. And the evolution of Socialism from the Red spectre on the barricade, with community of wives (all petroleuses), and Compulsory Atheism, to the Fabian Society and the Christian Social Union, constitutional, respectable, even official, eminent, and titled, is every day allaying his dread of it and increasing his scepticism as to the inevitability of the ever more and more dreaded knock of the ground landlord’s agent and the rate collector.

Now, as everyone knows, the course of evolution, in Socialism or anything else, does not involve the transformation of the earlier forms into the later. The earlier forms persist side by side with the later until they are either deliberately exterminated by them or put out of countenance so completely that they lose the heart to get born. This is what has happened in the evolution of Fabian Socialism. Fabian Socialism has not exterminated the earlier types; and though it has put them so much out of countenance that they no longer breed freely, still there they are still, preaching, collecting subscriptions, and repulsing from Socialism many worthy citizens who are quite prepared to go as far, and farther, than the Fabian Society. Occasionally they manage even to contest a Parliamentary seat in the name of Socialism, and to reassure the Capitalist parties by coming out at the foot of the poll with fewer votes than one would have thought possible for any human candidate, were he even a flat-earth-man, in these days when everyone can find a following of some sort. More often, however, they settle down into politically negligible sects, with a place of weekly meeting in which they preach to one another every week, except in the summer months, when they carry the red flag into the open air and denounce society as it passes or loiters to listen. Now far be it from us to repudiate these comrades. If a man has been brought to conviction of sin by the Countess of Huntingdon’s Connexion, and subsequently enters the Church and becomes an Archbishop, he will always have sufficient tenderness for the Connexion to refrain from attacking it, and to remember that many of its members are better Christians and better men than the more worldly-wise pillars of the Church. The principal leaders of the Fabian movement are in the same position with regard to many little societies locally known as “the Socialists.” We know that their worship of Marx (of whose works they are for the most part ignorant, and of whose views they are intellectually incapable) and their repetition of shibboleths about the Class War and the socialization of all the means of production, distribution, and exchange have no more application to practical politics than the Calvinistic covenants which so worried Cromwell when he, too, tried to reconcile his sectarian creed with the practical exigencies of government and administration. We know also, and are compelled on occasion to say bluntly out, that these little sects are ignorant and incapable in public affairs; that in many cases their assumption of an extreme position is an excuse for doing nothing under cover of demanding the impossible; and that their inability to initiate any practical action when they do by chance get represented on public bodies often leads to their simply voting steadily for our opponents by way of protest against what they consider the compromising opportunism of the Fabians. There are moments when they become so intolerable a nuisance to the main body of the movement that we are sorely tempted to excommunicate them formally, and warn the public that they represent nobody but their silly selves. But such a declaration, though it would be perfectly true as far as political and administrative action is concerned, would be misleading on the whole. In England, everyone begins by being absurdly ignorant of public life and inept at public action. Just as the Conservative and Liberal Parties are recruited at Primrose League meetings and Liberal and Radical demonstrations at which hardly one word of sense or truth is uttered, but at which nevertheless the novice finds himself in a sympathetic atmosphere, so even the Fabian Society consists largely of Socialists who sowed their wild oats in one or other of these little sects of Impossibilists. Therefore we not only suffer them as gladly as human nature allows, but give them what help and countenance we can when we can do so without specifically endorsing their blunders. Fortunately the immense additions which have been made to the machinery of democracy in England in the last twenty years, from the County Councils of 1888 to the education authorities of 1902, have acted as schools of public life to thousands of men of small means who in the old days must have remained Impossibilists from want of public experience. One hour on a responsible committee of a local authority which has to provide for some public want and spend some public money, were it but half a crown, will cure any sensible man of Impossibilism for the rest of his life. And such cures are taking place every day, and converting futile enthusiasts into useful Fabians.

A word as to this book. It is not a new edition of Fabian Essays. They are reprinted exactly as they appeared in 1889, nothing being changed but the price. No other course was possible. When the essays were written, the Essayists were in their thirties: they are now in their fifties, except the one, William Clarke, who is in his grave. We were then regarded as young desperadoes who had sacrificed their chances in life by committing themselves publicly to Socialism: we are now quoted as illustrations of the new theory that Socialists, like Quakers, prosper in this world. It is a dangerous theory; for Socialism, like all religions and all isms, can turn weak heads as well as inspire and employ strong ones; but we, at all events, have been fortunate enough to have had our claim to public attention admitted in the nineteen years which have elapsed since our youthful escapade as Fabian Essayists.

It goes without saying that in our present position, and with the experience we have gained, we should produce a very different book if the work were to be done anew. We should not waste our time in killing dead horses, however vigorously they were kicking in 1889. We should certainly be much more careful not to give countenance to the notion that the unemployed can be set to work to inaugurate Socialism; though it remains true that the problem of the unemployed, from the moment when we cease to abandon them callously to their misery or soothe our consciences foolishly by buying them off with alms, will force us to organize them, provide for them, and train them; but the very first condition of success in this will be the abandonment of the old idea that the unemployed tailor can be set to make clothes for the unemployed bootmaker and the unemployed bootmaker to make boots for the unemployed tailor, the real difficulty being, not a scarcity of clothes and boots, but a stupid misdistribution of the money to buy them. We should also probably lay more stress on human volition and less on economic pressure and historic evolution as making for Socialism. We should, in short, give the dry practice of our solutions of social problems instead of the inspiration and theory of them. But we should also produce a volume which, though it might appeal more than the present one to administrative experts, to bankers, lawyers, and constructive statesmen, would have much less charm for the young, and for the ordinary citizen who is in these matters an amateur.

Besides, the difference between the view of the young and the elderly is not necessarily a difference between wrong and right. The Tennysonian process of making stepping stones of our dead selves to higher things is pious in intention, but it sometimes leads downstairs instead of up. When Herbert Spencer in his later days expunged from his Social Statics the irresistible arguments for Land Nationalization by which he anticipated Henry George, we could not admit that the old Spencer had any right to do this violence to the young Spencer, or was less bound either to confute his position or admit it than if the two had been strangers to one another. Having had this lesson, we do not feel free to alter even those passages which no longer represent our latest conclusions. Fortunately, in the main we have nothing to withdraw, nothing to regret, nothing to apologize for, and much to be proud of. So we leave our book as it first came into the world, merely writing “Errors Excepted” as solicitors do: that is, with the firm conviction that the errors, if they exist at all, do not greatly matter.

_21st May, 1908._

THE FABIAN SOCIETY.

BY WILLIAM CLARKE, M.A.

No visitor to the British capital will mingle very long in the political life of London before he will hear of the Fabian Society. Few readers have not heard of the Roman general, Quinctus Fabius Maximus, _qui cunctando restituit rem_, and who consequently received the title of Cunctator. That illustrious man is the patron saint of the society, through which, being dead, he yet speaketh.

The Fabian Society proposes then to conquer by delay; to carry its programmes, not by a hasty rush, but through the slower but, as it thinks, surer methods of patient discussion, exposition, and political action of those who are absolutely convinced in their own minds. For a convenient motto the society has taken the following sentence: “For the right moment you must wait, as Fabius did, most patiently, when warring against Hannibal, though many censured his delays; but when the time comes you must strike hard, as Fabius did, or your waiting will be in vain and fruitless.” This double policy then, of waiting and striking, is the general idea of the society.

What now are the aims of the society? I quote from the official programme: “The Fabian Society consists of Socialists. It therefore aims at the reorganization of society by the emancipation of land and industrial capital from individual and class ownership, and the vesting of them in the community for the general benefit. In this way only can the natural and acquired advantages of the country be equitably shared by the whole people. The society accordingly works for the extinction of private property in land, and of the consequent individual appropriation, in the form of rent, of the price paid for permission to use the earth, as well as for the advantages of superior soils and sites. The society, further, works for the transfer to the community of the administration of such industrial capital as can be managed socially. For, owing to the monopoly of the means of production in the past, industrial inventions and the transformation of surplus income into capital have mainly enriched the proprietary class, the workers being now dependent on that class for leave to earn a living.” To bring this condition of things about, the programme continues, the society looks to the spread of Socialist opinions, and it seeks to promote these by the general dissemination of knowledge as to the relation between the individual and society in its economic, ethical, and political aspects.

These, then, are the fundamental ideas of the Fabian Society. Before describing its growth, work and personnel, let me give an account and explanation of its origin. The effective modern Socialist movement in England began in 1881. In that year a conference was held at the Westminster Palace Hotel in London, at which were present the venerable Francis W. Newman, brother of the late cardinal; Helen Taylor, the step-daughter of John Stuart Mill; Mr. Hyndman, the Socialist author and leader; some men now in Parliament, others who have been there, and a small number of energetic people well known in London, but not equally well known in America. These persons and others formed, after much discussion, the Democratic Federation, a body which at first appeared to be nothing more than a vigorous Radical protest against the Irish coercive policy of the Gladstone Cabinet then in power. Immense demonstrations, some of the biggest ever held in London, were got up by the Federation, who secured the adherence in this cause of some of the Irish members of Parliament. But gradually the mere Radicalism dropped out of the Federation’s programme; and under the stimulating influence of Mr. Henry George, who was then in England, whose book was being read everywhere, and who enjoyed much influence then in England, the Federation preached the doctrine of the “land for the people.” But a still further stage in its evolution was to be reached; and by the autumn of 1883 it came out as a full-blown Socialist organization, and published a little pamphlet entitled “Socialism Made Plain,” which had a great run and which, singular as it may seem now, created a perfect consternation among persons who supposed that Socialism was merely a French or German eccentricity, due to militarism and protectionism, and that it could never rear its head in “free” England. Mr. Herbert Spencer, among others, took alarm and predicted a “coming slavery,” and the venerable _Quarterly Review_ shook its venerable head and marvelled, like Mrs. Sarah Gamp, at the “brajian imperence” of these wicked agitators. It was perfectly evident that a new political force was come into being.

But there were those in London who, sympathizing deeply with the new movement, nevertheless could not throw themselves heartily into it, for two reasons: first, it assumed that a revolutionary change affecting the very bases of society could be brought about all at once; second, it appeared to ignore what may be called the spiritual side of life, and to disregard the ethical changes necessary to render a different social system possible. Such was the state of things in the autumn of 1883, when a very able man, Mr. Thomas Davidson, of New York, whom all who have meet him know to be a man of exceptional force and enthusiasm, spent some weeks in London. Mr. Davidson, noting the condition of things, gathered round him little conferences of men, at several of which I was present; and while he was in London, and for several months after, these purely informal conferences went on at different people’s houses. It would be too long a tale to tell of the endless discussions which took place, of the dull men and the brilliant men, the cranks and the thinkers, the men with long hair and the women with short hair, who debated and argued, and went for one another, and then debated and argued again. The main upshot was that these persons found themselves ultimately divided into two camps, not necessarily hostile, but laying emphasis on different aspects of the social movement. One of these was composed of persons who laid supreme stress on the need for ethical and spiritual change as a constant factor in the social movement, and as a coefficient with the material changes. These persons formed themselves into a little body called the New Fellowship, which still exists, small in numbers, but very earnest in purpose, and which publishes a small quarterly journal called _Seedtime_. The other class, which agreed with the Social Democratic Federation as to the urgent need for social and political change, but thought this must be very gradual, and its leaders persons of some culture and grasp of economics, formed the Fabian Society. This is the genesis of this active body.

There is a prevalent view, expressed sometimes in American newspapers, that the Socialist movement is largely made up of cranks and scoundrels--a view shared in a less degree by a portion of the English press. I believe there is in every country and age an abundant crop of both these classes; and assuredly the Socialist, like every other movement, has had its share of both. But to suppose that a great movement which is sweeping Europe from end to end, which has given birth to the largest single political party in Germany, which has gained victories innumerable in France, which is modifying the whole of English political life--to suppose that this movement is the outcome of the delusions of a few wicked or foolish men, is itself the delusion of people who are probably themselves not over-good or over-wise. In Marx, Lassalle, Rodbertus, Malon and others, the Socialist movement has been served by some of the best brains of our century; and it was no idle boast of Lassalle that he was equipped with all the best culture of his time. I know the inside of the Socialist movement well, and it certainly numbers among its adherents the ablest men I know. The Fabian Society contains not a few of these men. Walter Crane, the artist; Stopford Brooke, the preacher and man of letters; Grant Allen, one of the most versatile and accomplished men living; George Bernard Shaw, one of the most brilliant albeit whimsical of musical and dramatic critics; Miss Willard, one of America’s women reformers; Professor Shuttleworth, now London’s most popular and able Broad Church clergyman; Mr. D. G. Ritchie, of Oxford, foremost among English philosophic thinkers; Mrs. Theodore Wright, one of our most powerful actresses; Sergius Stepniak, next to Tolstoi the first of living Russians; Alfred Hayes, one of the first of our younger poets; Dr. Furnival, most learned and active of old English scholars,--these are among its members.

But it is not, of course, the mere inclusion of eminent people that gives a society force and authority. It is the being grounded in knowledge and ideas; and here the society is strong. It was recognized from the first by its members that the social problem cannot be solved by mere sentiment, though sentiment must be a factor in its solution. There must be a deal of hard thinking and severe study, not altogether in books (many of which on the economic problems before us are worthless), but in social facts. Its critics think the society has erred on the other side, and become too hard, and even cynical; but I confess I think that better than talking mere gushing moral platitudes which people applaud and then forget all about. The society has always steadily kept before it the idea that we are not looking for any millennium, any perfectly blissful earthly paradise, but that we are considering the much more prosaic question, how the economic interests of society are to be served, how the economic arrangements of society are to be carried on. Hence its members determined to equip themselves for their work by hard reading and thinking and by very stiff discussion of the crucial problems in history, economics and political philosophy. To this end they were greatly aided by a useful little Historical Society, which was formed in one of the suburbs of London, where every week an essay was read and completely discussed. I do not believe there are any better read or more acute minds in England than these of the young men who formed this group and who have largely remained the nucleus of the Fabian Society,--and this though they have their faults, like other people.

At first the idea was to have a very small number of members, scarcely more than could be gathered in a good-sized room in a private house. These were to be well trained and to be apostles. Gradually, however, the society grew and grew, the barriers of exclusion were broken down, and persons of less knowledge and experience were brought in. At the present time I think almost all callings are represented in the society. I find in the last list of members, lawyers, artists, journalists, doctors, workingmen, clergymen, teachers, trade-union leaders, literary people, shop-keepers and persons of no occupation. There are no millionnaires in the society, as there are no paupers, but there are a few quite well-to-do people. A large proportion are bright young men, and there are not a few bright and active women. Individual instances of the sort of people who belong and what they do are better than mere vague generalizations. Here are cases:--

A young man employed in the Central Post-Office at a salary of $650 a year. He has married a very charming and able girl, also a member. They occupy two or three rooms in a suburban house. The young lady has been elected as a guardian of the poor, the only woman among a number of men. Her husband devotes nearly all his spare time after office-hours to the society’s propaganda. He has had a little portable desk and stand made for himself, and at this he speaks in open spaces on street corners or wherever he can get an audience. His wife accompanies him and sells literature. Do not suppose that these are a blatant young demagogue and a conventional, strong-minded woman. Both are educated, intelligent, of sweet disposition; but the Socialist movement has taken hold of them and given them something they needed, lifted them above the region of what John Morley calls “greasy domesticity,” and taught them that there is a great suffering world beyond the four walls of home to be helped and worked for. Depend upon it, a movement which can do this has in it some promise of the future.

Or take the amusing, cynical, remarkable George Bernard Shaw, whose Irish humor and brilliant gifts have partly helped, partly hindered, the society’s popularity. This man will rise from an elaborate criticism of last night’s opera or Richter concert (he is the musical critic of the _World_), and after a light, purely vegetarian meal, will go down to some far-off club in South London, or to some street-corner in East London, or to some recognized place of meeting in one of the parks, and will there speak to poor men about their economic position and their political duties. People of this sort, who enjoy books and music and the theatre and good society, do not go down to dreary slums or even more dreary lecture-rooms to speak on such themes to the poorer class of workingmen without some strong impelling power; and it is that power, that motive force, upon which I dwell, as showing what is doing in the London of to-day. I am satisfied, from inquiries I have made, that there is really nothing like this going on in any other country of the world; but it is a commonplace in London.

The original parent Fabian Society, after it began to expand and employ a paid secretary and become a recognized institution, suggested to people elsewhere that they might have local Fabian Societies; and the first of these were formed in Birmingham, where several of the members addressed crowded, very intelligent and very enthusiastic audiences in a hall in the centre of that city. There are also local Fabian Societies now in Manchester, Edinburgh, Bristol, Leeds, Newcastle, Plymouth, Wolverhampton, Bradford, York and other English towns, altogether forty-eight in number; and there is also one in Adelaide, South Australia, and another in Bombay. Some of these are quite small, but others are important, and are beginning to exercise a considerable influence in municipal politics, and in one or two places in Parliamentary politics also. The society has been represented at International Labor Congresses in Paris, Brussels, Zürich and Chicago.

And now what has in the main been the sort of work the society has done? At first the idea of its members was rather to discuss among themselves and teach themselves than to teach others. This was the initial or self-forming stage. Then came the educational stage, and, third, the political or active stage, though even in this, its third stage, education is still the main object of the society. Fortnightly discussions have been kept up continuously, save for a two months’ summer recess, for years. At these members of the society read papers, or outsiders, and notably opponents, were invited. The late Charles Bradlaugh came to oppose, and was very promptly demolished; while, on the other hand, Oscar Wilde has spoken with eloquence and power on the relation of art and Socialism. The society tried to get Mr. A. J. Balfour, the Conservative leader, and Mr. W. H. Mallock, as the ablest literary opponent of Socialism, to come and argue seriously, but neither of them would do so. Mr. Haldene, the translator of Schopenhauer and cultured philosophic member of Parliament, came to oppose, was handled rather vigorously, and has now been largely converted to collectivism. Mr. David F. Schloss, whom the British Government recently sent over to the United States to inquire into labor matters, has spoken sympathetically; and Mr. Donisthorpe, the clever, cynical, superficial English individualist, has spoken and has been mercilessly handled. The result of all this debating is that the Fabian Society has now some of the best debaters in England. It has also some of the best lecturers, for it is in lectures that its work has largely consisted. The society now gives something over one thousand lectures a year, all free, the lecturers being all unpaid. Indeed, excepting the secretary’s office, the whole of the society’s work is voluntary, unpaid work. The majority of these lectures are given in workmen’s clubs, of which there are some hundreds in London alone. I take at random from the 1891 list of lectures sample subjects:--

The Socialism of John Ruskin; The Eight Hours’ Bill; Railway Reform; Liberty, Equality, Fraternity; Methods of Social Evolution; Adam, the first and last Individualist; Why we want a Labor Party; The Gospel of getting on; What the Farm Laborers want; The Social Hell and its Sources; Experiments in Housing the People; Socialism and Individual Liberty; the Church’s Message to Men of Wealth; Free Comments on the Population Question; The Worker’s Share of Wealth; The Programme of Social Democracy; John Lilburne and the Levellers; The Chartist Movement; The Religion of Socialism; the Industrial History of England; Gospel of Bread and Butter; Workingmen and their Difficulties; Co-operative Production and Socialism; Wealth and the Commonwealth; The French Revolution; The Right to Live; What Socialists Propose to Do; Twenty Years of the Labor Movement.

From these it will be seen what extensive ground is covered. These lectures are for the most part delivered to workingmen, but sometimes there are middle-class audiences, and I have heard of Fabian lecturers talking to people in aristocratic drawing-rooms. From the first, the society has done some publishing, and the last list gives no fewer than forty-five pamphlets or tracts issued by the society. The first of these, “Why are the Many Poor?” was a crude one, but good for rousing attention, which is always the first thing to be done, and quite justifying some curious Socialistic vagaries. The most valuable of these pamphlets are “Facts for Socialists,” a really crushing answer to those whom Matthew Arnold calls the “self-complacent moles,” all based on the best available statistics; “Facts for Londoners,” an appalling generalization of the economic condition of London; “What to Read,” a most admirable and impartially selected list of books for social reformers, which might with advantage be reprinted in America; “The Reform of the Poor Law”; and “The Impossibilities of Anarchism,” a searching criticism of the Anarchist position by George Bernard Shaw. Remember that the preparation of these has all been voluntary, unpaid labor, and has involved an immense amount of toil.

In 1888 the society determined to give a course of lectures by those of its members who were supposed to be best fitted for the purpose, setting forth the general principles of Socialism as they understood them. The lectures were eight in number, and were delivered to densely packed audiences, making such an impression that it was decided to publish them in a volume; and in the next year they appeared, under the title of “Fabian Essays in Socialism.” As it is a case of _quorum pars magna fui_, I am precluded from giving my estimate of a volume in which I had a share; but I may say that this work has had a very great sale--thirty thousand copies, the largest sale of any purely economic work I know of excepting “Progress and Poverty,”--and that its respectful and even cordial welcome by the English press was a surprise. The fact shows that the public mind is being prepared for great social changes. The ruling idea of the book is that of inevitable political and industrial evolution,--nothing in the least degree merely utopian, but an attempted generalization on the lines of modern scientific ideas. The publication of this book first gave to the Fabian Society a national instead of a merely local reputation; and I believe the book has now been widely read in America and Germany, while it was introduced to France by the _Revue Socialiste_. Several courses of lectures have since been given by the society, but none of them have been afterwards published.

The third phase of the society’s activity is, as I have said, in practical politics. This was not undertaken without some misgivings. On the principle that you cannot touch pitch without being defiled, I confess I doubted whether, until the people had been far more educated in these ideas, it was wise to enter the somewhat dirty political arena. But the intense desire to be _doing_ something, to translate ideas into facts, to organize the people, to help in shaping the actual progressive movement in England, and above all, perhaps, to weaken and destroy the individualist wing of the Liberal party,--these and other motives acted with cumulative force, especially as members of the society began to find that they had acquired influence over little groups of workmen here and there. There were great dangers and difficulties. There was the danger of falling into mere wire-pulling and making of political “deals,”--a subject about which people in America know so much that it is not necessary to enlarge upon it; and then there was the practical difficulty of differences of opinion in the society, which might cause wreck if political action were indulged in. I may say at once that these difficulties remain and will continue to do so, though they have not led to disruption yet. There are inveterate wire-pullers in the society, and there are those who favor an independent labor party, those who want to permeate the Radicals and gradually gain them over; and there are even a few who, as between the two parties, prefer Tories to Radicals. The first political chance for the Fabian Society came at the London county council election in 1889, when the advanced party in London paid the society the compliment of appropriating its entire pamphlet, “The London Programme,” and making of it the Progressive platform of the campaign. The Progressives carried that election, and they carried it on “The London Programme.” Still more striking was the Progressive victory in 1892, when the Moderate or Conservative party was almost annihilated at the polls. The Fabian Society has supplied London with its programme of reforms; and the reforms were in the direction of what it is now the fashion to call municipal Socialism. At the second county council election, several Fabians were candidates, and four of them were actually elected; while a fifth, Ben Tillett, the labor leader, was afterwards made an alderman. Three members of the society proved formidable though unsuccessful candidates at the Parliamentary election two years ago. A considerable number of members are on local municipal councils and school boards, and another fought a very remarkable Parliamentary fight during the last year. So it is clear that the society is largely _en evidence_.