THE HISTORY OF THE FABIAN SOCIETY, by Edward R. Pease

That's French for "the ancient system," as in the ancient system of feudal privileges and the exercise of autocratic power over the peasants. The ancien regime never goes away, like vampires and dinosaur bones they are always hidden in the earth, exercising a mysterious influence. It is not paranoia to believe that the elites scheme against the common man. Inform yourself about their schemes here.

Re: THE HISTORY OF THE FABIAN SOCIETY, by Edward R. Pease

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Chapter 9: The Episode of Mr. Wells: 1906-8

His lecture on administrative areas—"Faults of the Fabian"—The Enquiry Committee—The Report, and the Reply—The real issue, Wells v. Shaw—The women intervene—The Basis altered—The new Executive—Mr. Wells withdraws—His work for Socialism—The writing of Fabian Tracts.

Image
From a photograph by Lambert Weston and Son, Folkestone
H.G. WELLS, IN 1908
At the door of his house at Sandgate


The long controversy introduced by Mr. H.G. Wells attracted much public attention to the Fabian Society, added greatly to its numbers, and for a time made it more of a popular institution than it had been before or has been since. But, in fact, its main permanent interest arises from the persons who played the leading parts. The real question at issue was one neither of Socialist theory nor of Socialist policy. In so far as these entered in, Mr. Wells preached to willing listeners, and the only difference of opinion was as to the relative stress to be laid on particular points. When the episode was over, the chief change made in Fabian policy was one which Mr. Wells did not initiate, and which as soon as it was actually adopted he virtually repudiated.[34] The substance of the controversy was whether the members desired to hand over their Society to be managed by Mr. Wells alone, or whether they preferred to retain their old leaders and only to accept Mr. Wells as one amongst the rest.

Mr. Wells became a member in February, 1903, and in March gave his first lecture to the Society on a very technical subject, "The Question of Scientific Administrative Areas in Relation to Municipal Undertakings," a paper subsequently published as an appendix to "Mankind in the Making."

It was probably his first appearance on a public platform; and as a lecture it was by no means a success, because he read his paper in a low monotonous voice, addressed to a corner of the hall. If Mr. Wells had been by nature or practice as effective in speaking as he is in writing the fate of the Fabian Society might have been different. He was severely handicapped in his contest with the skilled debaters of the "Old Gang," and though after a short time he learnt the art up to a point, he was never really at home on a platform, and since the Fabian episode he has confined himself for the most part to controversy in writing.

The next contribution of Mr. Wells to Fabian propaganda was on January 12th, 1906. This date had been fixed for his paper next referred to, but in view of the General Election then in progress he read in its place his admirable article entitled "This Misery of Boots," which was subsequently issued as a special Fabian publication.

On February 9th the great controversy began by the paper entitled "Faults of the Fabian," read by Mr. Wells to a members' meeting, and subsequently issued as a private document to all the members of the Society. It was couched altogether in a friendly tone, expressed cordial appreciation of the record of the Society, but criticised it for lack of imaginative megalomania. It was "still half a drawing-room society," lodged in "an underground apartment," or "cellar," with one secretary and one assistant. "The first of the faults of the Fabian, then, is that it is small, and the second that strikes me is that, even for its smallness, it is needlessly poor." The task undertaken by the Fabians "is nothing less than the alteration of the economic basis of society. Measure with your eye this little meeting, this little hall: look at that little stall of not very powerful tracts: think of the scattered members, one here, one there.... Then go out into the Strand. Note the size of the buildings and business places, note the glare of the advertisements, note the abundance of traffic and the multitude of people.... That is the world whose very foundations you are attempting to change. How does this little dribble of activities look then?"

The paper goes on to complain that the Society did not advertise itself, made the election of new members difficult, and maintained a Basis "ill-written and old-fashioned, harsh and bad in tone, assertive and unwise." The self-effacive habits and insidious methods of the Society were next criticised, and the writer exclaimed, "Make Socialists and you will achieve Socialism; there is no other plan." The history of the Fabian motto was made use of to enforce the view that victory can only be gained by straight fighters like Scipio, whilst Fabius, however successful at first, ended his career as a stumbling-block to progress. To effect the desired expansion the writer proposed to raise an income of £1000 a year, to increase the staff, to prepare literature for the conversion of unbelievers, and to get a number of young men and women, some paid and some unpaid, to carry on the propaganda and the administrative work. "Unless I am the most unsubstantial of dreamers, such a propaganda as I am now putting before you ought to carry our numbers up towards ten thousand within a year or so of its commencement."

At the close of the meeting it was unanimously agreed "that the Executive Committee be instructed to appoint a Committee consisting of members and non-members of the Executive to consider what measures should be taken to increase the scope, influence, income, and activity of the Society." Further, a temporary amendment was made to the rules deferring the Annual Meeting and Executive election until after the Committee had reported.

"The Executive Committee," says "Fabian News," "was of opinion that a large Committee including both the Executive and an equal number of unofficial members should be appointed. But as Mr. Wells, the author of the proposal, was resolutely opposed to this plan, the Executive decided that in the circumstances it was best to fall in with his wishes, and they accordingly appointed only those members, both Executive and other, whom Mr. Wells nominated and who were willing to serve."

The Committee thus appointed consisted of the Rev. Stewart Headlam, Mrs. Bernard Shaw, and G.R.S. Taylor of the Executive; Dr. Stanton Coit, W.A. Colegate, Dr. Haden Guest, Sydney Olivier, Mrs. Pember Reeves, H.G. Wells, and Mrs. Wells.

The Committee held its first sitting on February 28th, but its report was not completed and presented to the Executive until the following October, Mr. Wells having in the interval visited the United States.

"Faults of the Fabian," written before the election of 1906, gave little indication that its author anticipated the sudden outburst of interest in Socialism which followed the astonishing success of the Labour Party at the polls. When Keir Hardie was chosen as leader of the party, it was recognised that Socialism was no longer the creed of a few fanatics, but a political force supported, actively or passively, by the great organisations of Labour throughout the country, able to fight, and sometimes to beat both the older parties. A new era in politics had begun. The Tories had been defeated before by Mr. Gladstone's unrivalled personality. Now they were defeated, as they had not been for three-quarters of a century, by a party none of whose leaders possessed an outstanding personality, and by a programme which contained no item with any popular appeal. Everybody was thinking and talking politics; every political conversation began or ended with that unknown factor, the new Labour Party; every discussion of the Labour Party involved a discussion of Socialism.

Perhaps Mr. Wells with the intuition of genius in fact foresaw what was about to happen: perhaps it was only chance. Anyway his proposal for an enlarged and invigorated society came at the precise moment, when the realisation of his project was in fact possible; and, of course, his own vigorous and interesting personality attracted many to us who might have moved in other directions, or indeed never have moved at all.

The inner history of the Wells Committee has never been revealed, but the composition of the Committee indicates the probable truth of the rumours that the meetings were anything but dull, though in the end the Committee arrived at an unanimous report. Sydney Olivier was one of the "old gang," though at that time a vigorous supporter of all sorts of changes. Mr. Headlam has always stood at the extreme right of the movement, and in party politics has never abated his loyalty to Liberalism. Mr. G.R.S. Taylor and Dr. Haden Guest were at that time eager adherents of the Labour Party, and Dr. Coit, who had just fought an election for the Party, no doubt took the same line. Mrs. Shaw by habit and Mrs. Reeves by instinct belonged to the government rather than to the opposition: and Mr. Colegate, a judicious person, then quite young, doubtless inclined to the same side. Last but not least, Mr. Wells himself, then as always mercurial in his opinions, but none the less intensely opinionated, and unable to believe that anybody could honestly differ from him, was by himself sufficient to disturb the harmony of any committee.

Mrs. Wells acted as secretary, and the Committee took evidence from myself and others before the report was drawn up.

The Report of the Committee is a much less inspiring document than the irresponsible and entertaining "Faults of the Fabian." It was largely concerned with a number of administrative details. New books and "short readable tracts" were to be written, and the format of our publications was to be changed. Groups were to be revived in all localities (to be called "Wandsworth 1, Wandsworth 2, Wandsworth 3," and so on), together with Head-quarters groups, also numbered 1, 2, 3, etc. This perhaps is the chief remaining trace of the megalomania of the original scheme, and is hidden away in an appendix: all our efforts never yielded Wandsworth No. 1, let alone the others! A fixed minimum subscription payable on a fixed date and a list of subscriptions to be published annually were further suggestions. The rule of the Society had been and is to the contrary in both particulars. "Fabian News" was to be enlarged into a weekly review addressed to the public, a change which would have required an editorial staff and extensive new offices. A publications editor was to be appointed who would be able to publish, or to arrange for the publication of, such books as Mr. Wells' "A Modern Utopia" and Mr. Money's "Riches and Poverty." The Basis of the Society was to be rewritten, its name changed to the British Socialist Party—a title since adopted by the old Social Democratic Federation—the Executive Committee was to be replaced by a Council of twenty-five, which was to appoint three Committees of three members each for Publishing, for Propaganda, and General Purposes respectively. The last, to be entitled the Directing Committee, was to meet frequently and manage most of the affairs of the Society. Finally, "in harmonious co-operation with other Socialist and Labour bodies," the Society was to run candidates for Parliament and raise a fund for the purpose.

It will be seen that some of these proposals were merely speculative. Groups could be organised easily enough when the members in any district numbered hundreds instead of units, or, at best, dozens. New tracts could be published when they were written: a weekly review was possible if the capital was provided. The new Basis and the new name were matters of emphasis and taste rather than anything else. The new machinery of government was in the main a question to be decided by experience. Mr. Wells had none; it is said that he never sat on a Committee before that under discussion, and certainly while he remained a Fabian he never acquired the Committee habit. On the principle underlying some of these proposals, viz. that the Society should cease to treat membership as a privilege, and should aim at increasing its numbers, there was no serious controversy. The Executive Committee had already carried through a suggestion made in the discussion on "Faults of the Fabian" for the creation of a class of Associates, entitled to all privileges except control over policy, with a view to provide a means of attracting new adherents. The one constructive proposal, direct collective participation in Parliamentary Elections, was quite alien to Mr. Wells' original ideas; it was forced on him, it is said, by other members of his Committee and was described by himself later on as "secondary and subordinate."[35]

The Executive Committee transmitted the Special Committee's Report to the members of the Society accompanied by a Report of their own, drafted by Bernard Shaw and incomparably superior to the other as a piece of literature.[36]

The reply of the Executive Committee began by welcoming criticism from within the Society, of which they complained that in the past they had had too little. An opposition, they said, was a requisite of good government. They were prepared to welcome expansion, but they pointed out that the handsome offices proposed must be produced by the large income and not the income by the handsome offices. A publishing business on the scale suggested could not be undertaken by an unincorporated society; moreover, at present the Society had not sufficient income to pay its officials at the market rate, or to keep out of debt to its printer. They agreed that the Executive Committee should be enlarged, but recommended twenty-one instead of twenty-five members; and that the three proposed sub-committees be appointed, but of seven members each instead of three. The project of triumvirates they could not endorse, both for other reasons and because all the leading members of the Society refused to serve on them, while the essence of the scheme was that the triumvirs should be the most influential members of the Society. The abolition of the old-fashioned restrictions on admission to membership was approved, but not the proposal for a fixed subscription payable on an appointed date. The Executive Committee did not object to the proposed new Basis as a whole (and in fact it is on record that its adoption by the Executive was only lost by 7 votes to 6); but considered that passages were open to criticism and that the time and effort necessary for carrying through any new Basis, so worded as to unite practically the whole Society, would be better spent in other ways. A Socialist weekly would be valuable, but it would not replace "Fabian News," which was required for the internal purposes of the Society, and capable journalists like Mr. Wells himself preferred the publicity of the "Fortnightly Review" and "The Times," to the "Clarion" and the "Labour Leader." The Reply goes at great length into the difficulty of forming a Socialist Party, and into the composition and policy of the Labour Party, all admirably argued, but just a little unreal; for Bernard Shaw has never quite understood the Labour Party which he did so much to create, and at the same time he is thoroughly convinced that he sees it as it is, in the white light of his genius. Permeation is described, explained, and defended—the Special Committee had suggested rather than proposed, in scarcely more than a sentence, that the policy be abandoned—and it is announced that as long as the Executive was unchanged there would be no reversal of the political policy of the Society. Finally the Reply asserts that the time had come to attempt the formation of a middle-class Socialist Party. At the end three resolutions were set out, which the Executive submitted to the Society for discussion.

How much of personality, how little of principle there was in the great controversy is indicated by the fact that Mrs. Bernard Shaw signed the Special Committee Report, with the reservation that she also completely agreed with the Reply. Mr. Headlam also was a party to both documents: Mr. G.R.S. Taylor, alone of the three Executive members of the Special Committee, supported the Report and dissociated himself from the Reply. Of course the Executive Committee had to decide points in their Report by a majority. That majority, in the case of the proposed revision of the Basis, was, as already mentioned, one vote only. I did not concur with the view expressed about the Labour Party, a body scarcely less easy to be understood by an outsider than the Fabian Society itself: and at that time I was the only insider on the Fabian Executive.

But the real issue was a personal one. The Executive Committee at that time consisted, in addition to the three just named, of Percy Alden (Liberal M.P. for Tottenham), Hubert Bland, Cecil E. Chesterton, Dr. F. Lawson Dodd, F.W. Galton, S.G. Hobson, H.W. Macrosty, W. Stephen Sanders, Bernard Shaw, George Standring, Sidney Webb and myself. Mr. Alden was too busy with his new parliamentary duties to take much part in the affair. All the rest, except of course Mr. Taylor, stood together on the real issue—Was the Society to be controlled by those who had made it or was it to be handed over to Mr. Wells? We knew by this time that he was a masterful person, very fond of his own way, very uncertain what that way was, and quite unaware whither it necessarily led. In any position except that of leader Mr. Wells was invaluable, as long as he kept it! As leader we felt he would be impossible, and if he had won the fight he would have justly claimed a mandate to manage the Society on the lines he had laid down. As Bernard Shaw led for the Executive, the controversy was really narrowed into Wells versus Shaw.

The Report was sent to the members with "Fabian News" for December, 1906, and it was the occasion of much excitement. The Society had grown enormously during the year. The names of no less than ninety applicants for membership are printed in that month's issue alone. In March, 1907, the membership was 1267, an increase of nearly 500 in two years.

The discussion was carried on at a series of meetings held at Essex Hall, Strand, under the chairmanship of Mr. H. Bond Holding, on December 7th and 14th, 1906, and January 11th and 18th, February 1st and March 8th, and also at the Annual Meeting for 1905-6, held on February 22nd, 1907. The series was interrupted for the London County Council Election on March 2nd, in which many of the members were concerned.

With a view to a "Second Reading" debate the executive Committee had put down a general resolution that their report be received, but Mr. Wells did not fall in with this plan, and the resolution on the motion of Bernard Shaw was adopted without discussion. On the first clause of the next resolution, instructing the Executive to submit amendments to the Rules for increasing their number to twenty-five, Mr. Wells, acting for himself, moved an amendment "approving the spirit of the report of the Committee of Enquiry, and desiring the outgoing Executive to make the earliest possible arrangements for the election of a new Executive to give effect to that report." His speech, which occupied an hour and a quarter and covered the whole field, would have been great if Mr. Wells had been a good speaker. Written out from notes, it was printed in full by himself for circulation amongst the members, and it is vigorous, picturesque entertaining, and imaginative, as his work always is. But it delivered him into the hands of his more experienced opponents by virtually challenging the society to discard them and enter on a regenerated career under his guidance. It was a heroic issue to force; and it was perhaps the real one; but it could have only one result. The discussion was adjourned to the 14th, and at 9 o'clock on that evening Bernard Shaw replied on the whole debate. His main proposition was that, as the amendment had been converted by Mr. Wells' printed and circulated speech into a motion of want of confidence, the leaders of the Society must and would retire if it were adopted. They were willing to discuss every point on its merits and to abide by the decision of the Society, but they would not accept a general approval of the Committee's Report as against their own when it implied an accusation of misconduct. In the course of the speech Mr. Wells pledged himself not to retire from the Society if he was defeated; and at the end of it he consented to withdraw his amendment. Bernard Shaw's speech, probably the most impressive he has ever made in the Society, was delivered to a large and keenly appreciative audience in a state of extreme excitement. A long report pacifically toned down by Shaw himself, appears in "Fabian News" (January, 1907). It succeeded in its object. The Executive Committee welcomed the co-operation of Mr. Wells; the last thing they desired was to drive him out of the Society, and whilst they could not accept his report as a whole, they were willing to adopt any particular item after full discussion. There is no doubt that they would have won if the amendment had gone to a division, but they were only too glad not to inflict a defeat on their opponents.

***

The next episode in the debate requires a few words of introduction. The Society had always been in favour of votes for women. A proposition in the Manifesto, Tract No. 2, published as early as 1884, states that "men no longer need special political privileges to protect them against women," and in all our publications relating to the franchise or local government the claims of women to equal citizenship were prominently put forward. But we had published no tract specially on the subject of the Parliamentary Vote for Women. This was not mere neglect. In 1893 a committee was appointed "to draw up a tract advocating the claims of women to all civil and political rights at present enjoyed by men," and in March, 1894, it reported that "a tract had been prepared which the Committee itself did not consider suitable for publication." Later the Committee was discharged, and in face of this fiasco nothing further was done.

Mr. Wells took a strong view on the importance of doing something in relation to women and children, though exactly what he proposed was never clear. He offered to the Society his little book on "Socialism and the Family," subsequently published by Mr. Fifield, but the Executive Committee declined it precisely because of its vagueness: they were not disposed to accept responsibility for criticisms on the existing system, unless some definite line of reform was proposed which they could ask the Society to discuss and approve, or at any rate to issue as a well-considered scheme suitable for presentation to the public.

The new Basis proposed by the Special Committee declared that the Society sought to bring about "a reconstruction of the social organisation" by

(a) promoting transfer of land and capital to the State,

(b) "enforcing equal citizenship of men and women,

(c) "substituting public for private authority in the education and support of the young."


Precisely what the last clause meant has never been disclosed. Mr. Wells in his speech did nothing to elucidate it. Mr. Shaw in his reply criticised its vagueness and protested against possible interpretations of it. Mr. Wells stated some time later that he had resigned from the Society because we refused to adopt it. I do not think that any of his colleagues attached much importance to it, and none of them has attempted to raise the issue since.[37]

Clause (b) was another matter. Nobody objected to the principle of this, but many demurred to inserting it in the Basis. We regarded the Basis as a statement of the minimum of Socialism, without which no man had the right to call himself a Socialist. But there are a few Socialists, such as Mr. Belfort Bax, who are opposed to women's suffrage, and moreover, however important it be, some of us regard it as a question of Democracy rather than Socialism. Certainly no one would contend that approval of women's suffrage was acceptance of a part of the creed of Socialism. It is a belief compatible with the most thoroughgoing individualism.

But many of the women members had made up their minds that this clause must appear in the Basis, and under the leadership of Mrs. Pember Reeves, they had indicated they would vote for the Special Committee Report unless they got their way. Those who, like myself, regarded this amendment of the Basis as inexpedient, recognised also that the adoption of the Wells report was far more inexpedient, and the Executive consequently decided to support a proposal that they be instructed to submit an addition to the Basis declaring for equal citizenship for men and women. On January 11th, 1907, Mrs. Pember Reeves obtained precedence for a resolution to this effect, and she was seconded by Mrs. Sidney Webb, who, after fourteen years of membership, was now beginning to take a part in the business of the Society. The opposition was led by Dr. Mary O'Brien Harris, who objected not to the principle but to its inclusion in the Basis, but she was unsuccessful, and the instruction was carried.

On January 18th the debate on the Executive resolutions was resumed, and it was resolved to increase the Executive Committee to twenty-one, to form three standing Sub-Committees, and to abolish the old restrictions on membership. On February 1st the debate on Political Action began, and largely turned on the question whether we should attempt to found a Socialist Party or should subordinate our political activity to the Independent Labour Party. As the first step towards founding a middle-class Socialist Party was to be the establishment of Fabian Societies throughout the country, those of us who like myself did not believe in the possibility of the proposed new party could none the less support the scheme. Co-operation with the Labour Party was not in question; nor was the continuance of our friendly relations with the I.L.P., but the proposal to subordinate our political activity to the latter society met with but little support, and finally on March 2nd the Executive resolution to appoint a Committee for the purpose of drawing up a political policy was adopted against a very small minority. Mr. Wells took very little part in the proceedings after the Second Reading debate, and only one speech of his is mentioned in the report.

***

Meanwhile the controversy was being fought out on another field. The January meetings had settled the number of the new Executive and decided how the Basis should be altered. The Executive therefore was now able to summon the Annual Meeting in order to make the necessary amendments to the Rules. This was held on February 22nd, when the resolutions were adopted without discussion. The meeting then took up some minor items in the Report, and in particular certain other amendments to the Basis proposed by individual members. On these a resolution was carried that the new Executive appoint a Committee to revise the Basis. The Committee was in fact appointed, and consisted of Bernard Shaw, Sidney Webb, H.G. Wells, and Sidney Ball of Oxford. Mr. Wells resigned from the Society before its labours were completed, and no report was ever presented.

The Annual Meeting over, the way was now clear for the election of the new Executive. The ballot papers, sent out with the March "News," contained the names of 37 candidates, 13 out of the 15 of the retiring Committee and 24 others. In normal years the practice of issuing election addresses is strictly discouraged, because of the advantage they give to those rich enough to afford the expense. Therefore the record of new candidates, severely concrete statements of past achievements, is published in "Fabian News." On this occasion the usual distinction between old and new candidates was not made, and the Executive undertook to send out Election Addresses of candidates subject to necessary limits and on payment by the candidates of the cost of printing. In addition numerous other addresses were posted to the electors. The Old Gang made no attempt to monopolise the Executive by running a full ticket. The candidates in effect formed three groups, 15 supporters of the outgoing Executive, including 10 retiring members who issued a joint address; 13 candidates selected by a temporary Reform Committee whose names were sent out by Mr. Wells and his chief adherents; 7 independents, some of them supporters of the Executive and the others of the Reformers; and finally myself. As I was paid secretary and returning officer I did not formally associate myself with any party, though my general sympathy with my old colleagues was well known. Nine hundred and fifty-four members cast very nearly 17,000 votes. Sidney Webb headed the poll with 819 votes; I followed with 809. Bernard Shaw received 781, and Mr. Wells came fourth with 717. All the retiring members were re-elected except Cecil Chesterton, and including G.R.S. Taylor, who had vehemently opposed his colleagues. Eleven of the Executive list, nine of the Reformers, and myself constituted the new Committee. In fact it was an able and effective body. The Old Gang brought in Mr. Granville Barker; the Reformers included Mr. Wells, Mrs. Pember Reeves, Aylmer Maude, R.C.K. Ensor, Dr. Haden Guest, Sidney Ball, F.W. Pethick Lawrence, and Miss B.L. Hutchins—most, if not all, of whom received support from the friends of the Old Gang. Scarcely anything less like revolutionists can be imagined than this list. Mr. Pethick Lawrence, it is true, has since then done some hard fighting in another cause, but he has always acted with seriousness and deliberation. Most of the others might as well have figured on one ticket as the other. The Old Gang including myself had 12 votes and all the experience, against 9 on the other side. But the two sides did not survive the first meeting of the new Committee. There was, as I have already said, no differences of principle between the two parties. The expansion of the parent Society had come about, local Societies were growing up all over the country; Mr. Wells said no more about public authority over the young—indeed his election address made no reference to it—and Mr. Shaw did nothing to establish his Middle-Class Socialist Party.

The new Committee quickly settled down to work, but Mr. Wells was already wearying of his rôle as political organiser. He was appointed both to the General Purposes and the Propaganda Sub-Committees, but after attending two meetings of the former, and none of the latter, he resigned from both in October, and of the seventeen meetings of the Executive Committee during its year of office he attended only seven.

In April, 1908, he was re-elected to the Executive, again fourth on the poll, and Mrs. Wells who had not been a candidate before was also successful. But in the following September he resigned his membership of the Society, assigning as reasons "disagreement with the Basis which forms the Confession of Faith of the Society and discontent with the general form of its activities," together with a desire "to concentrate on the writing of novels." He explained that "a scheme which proposes to leave mother and child economically dependent on the father is not to me Socialism at all, but a miserable perversion of Socialism." The letter, printed in "Fabian News," goes on to refer to his objection to the "no compensation" clause in the Basis (the real weakness of which is that it refers hypothetically to a complete change of system and is never applied to any particular case[38]), and added that the opportunity for a propaganda to the British middle classes was now over. Mrs. Wells retained her seat on the Executive Committee till March, 1910, and soon after that date the connection of both of them with the Society altogether ceased.

***

I have now traced the main stream of the subject of this chapter, though a good deal remains to be said on other effects of the agitation. I have indicated that the actual proposals made by the Special Committee under the inspiration of Mr. Wells, in so far at any rate as they were controversial or controverted, were futile or impossible, and neither led, nor in my opinion could have led, to any benefit to the Society or to its objects. But it must not be inferred from this that the intervention of Mr. Wells, viewed as a whole, was of this character. He is a man of outstanding genius, and in so far as he used his powers appropriately, his work was of enormous value to Socialism; and his energy and attractive personality added radiance to the Society only equalled in the early days when the seven Essayists were all in the field and all fighting at their bravest. The new life in the Society during those brilliant years was due to other factors as well as Mr. Wells. Other Socialist Societies, in which he took no part, also increased their numbers and launched out into fresh activities. But for us Mr. Wells was the spur which goaded us on, and though at the time we were often forced to resent his want of tact, his difficult public manners, and his constant shiftings of policy, we recognised then, and we remember still, how much of permanent value he achieved.

Of this the chiefest is his books, and as the Society as such had no part in them, anything more than a reference to them is outside the scope of this volume. But it must be said that his "New Worlds for Old," published in 1908, whilst he was a member of the Fabian Executive, is perhaps the best recent book on English Socialism.

In this connection Mr. Wells displayed unexpected modesty and at the same time inexperience of the ways of the world. His first criticism of the Society, his first project of reform, related to our tracts. To this point he directed an unpublished preface to his paper "This Misery of Boots," when he read it to the Society before the controversy had actually started. He justly observed that very few of our publications were addressed to the unconverted, were emotional appeals to join our movement, or effective explanations of our general principles. He said that these ought to be written, and the odd thing is that he appeared to imagine that anybody, or at any rate a considerable number of people, could just sit down and write them. He was aware that he could do it himself, and he innocently imagined that plenty of other people could do it too. He blamed the Executive for failing to make use of the members in this respect, and persuaded them to invite any member to send in manuscripts.

In fact of course something like genius, or, at any rate, very rare ability, is required for this sort of work. Any competent writer can collect the facts about Municipal Drink Trade, or Afforestation, or Poor Law Reform: many can explain an Act of Parliament in simple language: but only one here and there can write what others care to read on the principles of Socialism and the broad aspects of its propaganda. If our list of tracts be examined it will be found that the great majority of the "general" tracts have been written by Sidney Webb and Bernard Shaw. A few other writers have contributed general tracts from a special standpoint, such as those on Christian Socialism. When we have mentioned reprinted papers by William Morris and Sir Oliver Lodge, and a tract by Sidney Ball, the list is virtually complete. Mr. Wells himself only contributed to us his paper "This Misery of Boots," and his appeal to the rank and file yielded nothing at all. Of course there are plenty of people as innocent in this respect as Mr. Wells was at that period referred to. Hardly a month has passed in the last twenty years without somebody, usually from the remote provinces, sending up a paper on Socialism, which he is willing to allow the Society to publish on reasonable terms. But only once have we thus found an unknown author whose work, on a special subject, we could publish, and he resigned a year or two later because we were compelled to reject a second tract which he wrote for us.

The history of the intervention of Mr. Wells is now complete. Some account of the expansion of the Society at this period will be given in the next chapter.

_______________

Notes:

[34] The "Wells Report" in October, 1906, recommended cordial co-operation with the Labour Party, including the running of candidates for Parliament, and it "warmly endorsed the conception of Socialists whenever possible,... standing as Socialists in Municipal and Parliamentary elections." In January, 1908, a scheme for effecting this was adopted by the Society. In May, 1908, Mr. Wells, writing to "Fabian News," said he should resign if the Society rejected his view that "the Fabian Society is a Society for the study, development, and propaganda of the Socialist idea. It extends a friendly support to the Labour Party, but it is not a political society and membership involves no allegiance to any political party."

This was written in connection with his support of a Liberal against a Socialist Candidate at North-West Manchester.

[35] In his election address referred to on p. 179.

[36] Private.—Report of the special Committee appointed in February, 1906, to consider measures for increasing the scope, influence, income, and activity of the Society, together with the Executive Committee's Report, and Resolutions thereon. To be submitted to the members at Essex Hall on Fridays the 7th and 14th December, 1906, at 7.30 p.m. The Fabian Society. November, 1906 (pp. 48).

[37] See his "New Worlds for Old," Chapter III, The First Main Generalisation of Socialism, which according to Mr. Wells is as follows:—

"The ideas of private individual rights of the parent and of his isolated responsibility for his children are harmfully exaggerated in the contemporary world. We do not sufficiently protect children from negligent, incompetent, selfish, or wicked parents.... The Socialist holds that the community should be responsible ... it is not simply the right but the duty of the State ... to intervene in any default for the child's welfare. Parentage rightly undertaken is a service as well as a duty to the world ... in any completely civilised state it must be sustained, rewarded, and controlled...."

Except for the last three words all this is neither new nor controversial amongst not merely Socialists but the mildest of social reformers, always excepting the Charity Organisation Society. The last word is not, I think, further explained.

[38] A Tramway or a Gasworks consists of two things: the actual plant, and the nominal capital which represents its value. When the plant is municipalised, its control is vested in the community, and the shareholders are "compensated" with municipal securities or cash obtained by loans from other investors in these securities. The capital value of the tramway still virtually belongs to the private holders of the municipal loan. But no second such step is possible. Holders of municipal stock cannot be "compensated," if it is taken from them. They can be paid off; or their property can be confiscated either by taxation or by repudiation of the debt: there is no middle course. The whole problem therefore arises from confusion of thought.

See Fabian Tract 147 "Capital and Compensation."
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Re: THE HISTORY OF THE FABIAN SOCIETY, by Edward R. Pease

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Chapter 10: The Policy of Expansion: 1907-12

Statistics of growth—The psychology of the Recruit—Famous Fabians—The Arts Group—The Nursery—The Women's Group—Provincial Fabian Societies—University Fabian Societies—London Groups revived—Annual Conferences—The Summer School—The story of "Socialist Unity"—The Local Government Information Bureau—The Joint Standing Committee—Intervention of the International Socialist Bureau.

Image
From a drawing by Jessie Holliday
SIDNEY WEBB, IN 1909


The episode described in the last chapter, which took place during the years 1906 to 1908, was accompanied by many other developments in the activities of the Society which must now be described. In the first place the membership grew at an unprecedented rate. In the year ended March, 1905, 67 members were elected. Next year the number was 167, to March, 1907, it was 455, to March, 1908, 817, and to March, 1909, 665. This was an enormous accession of new blood to a society which in 1904 had only 730 members in all. In 1909 the Society consisted of 1674 men and 788 women, a total of 2462; of these 1277 were ordinary members residing in or near London, 343 scattered elsewhere in the United Kingdom, 89 abroad; 414 were members of provincial Societies and 339 of University Societies. There were in addition about 500 members of local Fabian Societies who were not also members of the London Society, and the Associates numbered 217. The income from subscriptions of all sorts was £473 in 1904 and £1608 in 1908, the high-water mark in the history of the Society for contributions to the ordinary funds.

Of course there is all the difference in the world between a new member and an old. The freshly elected candidate attends every meeting and reads every word of "Fabian News." He begins, naturally, as a whole-hearted admirer and is profoundly impressed with the brilliance of the speakers, the efficiency of the organisation, the ability of the tracts. A year or two later, if he has any restlessness of intellect, he usually becomes a critic: he wants to know why there are not more brightly written tracts, explanatory of Socialism and suitable for the unconverted: he complains that the lectures are far less interesting than they used to be, that the debates are footling, the publications unattractive in appearance and too dull to read. A few years later he either settles down into a steady-going member, satisfied to do what little he can to improve this unsatisfactory world; or else, like Mr. Wells, he announces that the Society is no longer any good: once (when he joined) it was really important and effective: its methods were all right: it was proclaiming a fresh political gospel. But times have changed, whilst the Society has only grown old: it has done its work, and missed its opportunity for more. It is no longer worthy of his support.

In 1907 and 1908 the Society consisted largely of new members; consequently the meetings were crowded and we were driven out from one hall after another. Moreover the propagandist enthusiasm of Mr. Wells and the glamour of his name helped to attract a large number of distinguished persons into our ranks. Mr. Granville Barker was one of the most active of these. He served on the Executive from 1907 to 1912 and took a large share in the detailed work of the Committees, besides giving many lectures and assisting in social functions. The Rev. R.J. Campbell, who addressed large meetings on several occasions, as also elected to the Executive for the year 1908-9, but did not attend a single meeting. Mr. Aylmer Maude joined the Executive in 1907, held office to 1912, and is still a working member of the Society. Arnold Bennett, Laurence Irving, Edgar Jepson, Reginald Bray, L.C.C. (member of the Executive 1911-12), Sir Leo (then Mr.) Chiozza Money, M.P. (who sat on the Executive from 1908 to 1911), Dr. Stanton Coit, H. Hamilton Fyfe, A.R. Orage, G.M. Trevelyan, Edward Garnett, Dr. G.B. Clark (for many years M.P.), Miss Constance Smedley, Philip Snowden, M.P., Mrs. Snowden (Executive 1908-9), George Lansbury, Herbert Trench, Jerome K. Jerome, Edwin Pugh, Spencer Pryse, and A. Clutton Brock are amongst the people known in politics, literature, or the arts who joined the Society about this period.

Some of these took little or no part in our proceedings, beyond paying the necessary subscription, but others lectured or wrote for the Society or participated in discussions and social meetings. These were at this time immensely successful. In the autumn of 1907, for example, Mrs. Bernard Shaw arranged for the Society a series of crowded meetings of members and subscribers at Essex Hall on "The Faith I Hold." Mrs. Sidney Webb led off and was followed by the Rev. R.J. Campbell, S.G. Hobson, Dr. Stanton Coit, H.G. Wells, and Hubert Bland: with an additional discourse later in the spring by Sir Sydney Olivier. Mr. Wells' paper, which proved to be far too long for a lecture, was the first draft of his book "First and Last Things"; but he had tired of the Society when it was published, and the preface conceals its origin in something of a mystery. Sir John Gorst, Mrs. Annie Besant, Dr. Südekum (German M.P.), Sir John Cockburn, K.C.M.G., the Hon. W.P. Reeves, Raymond Unwin, and Sir Leo Chiozza Money were amongst the other lecturers of that year.

***

In 1906 and succeeding years a new form of organisation was established. Members spontaneously associated themselves into groups, "The Nursery" for the young, the Women's Group, the Arts Group, and Groups for Education, Biology, and Local Government. The careers of these bodies were various. The Arts Group included philosophy, and, to tell the truth, almost excluded Socialism. But all of us in our youth are anxiously concerned about philosophy and art and many who are no longer young are in the same case. Moreover artists and philosophers are always attractive. Mr. Holbrook Jackson and Mr. A.R. Orage, at that time associated in "The New Age," founded the group early in 1907, and soon obtained lecturers as distinguished, and audiences scarcely less numerous than the Society itself. But in eighteen months "Art and Philosophy in Relation to Socialism" seems to have been exhausted, and after the summer of 1908 the Group disappears from the calendar. Biology and Local Government had a somewhat longer but far less glorious career. The meetings were small and more of the nature of classes. Education is the life-work of a large class, which provides a sensible proportion of Fabian membership, and teachers are always eager to discuss and explain the difficult problems of their profession and the complex law which regulates it. The Education Group has led a diligent and useful life; it prepared a tract (No. 156), "What an Education Committee can do (Elementary Schools)," and besides its private meetings it arranges occasional lectures open to the public, which sometimes attract large audiences.

The Nursery belongs to another class. When a society, formed as many societies are, of quite young people, has existed over twenty years, the second generation begins to be adult, and wants to be quit of its parents. Moreover the young desire, naturally, to hear themselves talk, whilst the others usually prefer the older and more famous personages. So a number of younger members eagerly took up a plan which originated in the circle of the Bland family, for forming a group confined to the young in years or in membership in order to escape the overmastering presence of the elderly and experienced. Sometimes they invite a senior to talk to them and to be heckled at leisure. More often they provide their own fare from amongst themselves. Naturally the Nursery is not exclusively devoted to economics and politics: picnics and dances also have their place. Some of the members eventually marry each other, and there is no better security for prolonged happiness in marriage than sympathy in regard to the larger issues of life. The Nursery has produced one tract, No. 132, "A Guide to Books for Socialists," described in the "Wells Report" as intended "to supplement or even replace that arid and indiscriminating catalogue, What to Read."

Last in date, but by no means least in importance of the Groups of this period, was the Women's Group, founded by Mrs. C.M. Wilson, who after nearly twenty years of nominal membership had resumed her active interest in the Society. The vigorous part taken by the women of the Society under the leadership of Mrs. Reeves in obtaining the only alteration yet made in the Basis has been already described. The Group was not formed till a year later, and at that time the Women's Suffrage movement, and especially the party led by Mrs. Pankhurst, had attracted universal attention. The early Suffrage movement was mainly Socialist in origin: most of the first leaders of the Women's Social and Political Union were or had been members either of the Fabian Society or of the I.L.P. and it may almost be said that all the women of the Society joined one or more of the Suffrage Societies which for the next seven years played so large a part in national politics. But besides the question of the vote, which is not peculiar to Socialism, there is a very large group of subjects of special interest to Socialist women, either practical problems of immediate politics relating to the wages and conditions of women's labour and the treatment of women by Education Acts, National Insurance Acts, and Factory Acts; or remoter and more theoretical problems, especially those connected with the question whether the wife in the ideal state is to be an independent wage-earner or the mistress and manager of an isolated home, dependent on her husband as breadwinner. Efficiently organised by Mrs. C.M. Wilson, until ill-health required her resignation of the secretaryship in 1914; by Mrs. Bernard Shaw, Mrs. Pember Reeves, Miss Murby, Miss Emma Brooke, and many others, including in later years Dr. Letitia Fairfield, the Group has had many of the characteristics of an independent society. It has its own office, latterly at 25 Tothill Street, rented from the parent Society, with its own paid assistant secretary, and it has issued for private circulation its own publications. In 1913 it prepared a volume of essays on "Women Workers in Seven Professions," which was edited by Professor Edith Morley and published by George Routledge and Sons. It has prepared five tracts for the Society, published in the general list, under a sub-title, "The Women's Group Series," and it has taken an active part, both independently and in co-operation with other bodies, in the political movements specially affecting women, which have been so numerous in recent years.

***

It will be recollected that the only direct result of the Special Enquiry Committee, apart from the changes made in the organisation of the Society itself, was the decision to promote local Socialist Societies of the Fabian type with a view to increasing Socialist representation in Parliament. I have recounted in a previous chapter how this scheme worked out in relation to the Labour Party and the running of candidates for Parliament. It remains to describe here its measure of success in the formation of local societies.

The summer of 1905 was about the low-water mark of provincial Fabianism. Nine societies are named in the report, but four of these appeared to have no more than a nominal existence. The Oxford University Society had but 6 members; Glasgow had 30 in its University Society and 50 in its town Society; Liverpool was reduced to 63, Leeds and County to 15, and that was all. A year later the Cambridge University Society had been formed, Oxford had more than doubled its membership to 13, but only five other societies were in existence. By the following year a revival had set in. W. Stephen Sanders, at that time an Alderman of the London County Council, who had been a member of the Society since 1890 and of the executive Committee since 1904, was appointed Organising Secretary with the special object of building up the provincial organisation. By 1910 there were forty-six local societies, and in 1912 the maximum of fifty was reached. Since then the number has declined. These societies were scattered over the country, some of them in the great cities, Manchester, Newcastle, Sheffield, and so on: others within hail of London, at Croydon, Letchworth, Ilford: others again in small towns, Canterbury, Chelmsford, Carnarvon: another was at Bedales School, Petersfield, run by my son and his schoolfellows. The local societies formed at this period, apart from the University Societies, were in the main pallid reflections of the parent Society in its earlier days; none of them had the good fortune to find a member, so far as we yet know, of even second-class rank as a thinker or speaker. One or two produced praiseworthy local tracts on housing conditions and similar subjects. They usually displayed less tolerance than the London Society, a greater inclination to insist that there was but one way of political salvation, usually the Labour Party way, and that all who would not walk in it should be treated as alien enemies. If Socialism is only to be achieved by the making of Socialists, as Mr. Wells announced with all the emphasis of a rediscovery, no doubt the local societies achieved some Socialism, since they made some members. If Socialism is to be attained by the making of Socialist measures, doubtless they accomplished a little by their influence on local administration. Organisation for political work is always educative to those who take part in it, and it has some effect on the infinitely complex parallelogram of forces which determines the direction of progress. Possibly I underestimate the importance of local Fabian Societies; there is a school of thought, often represented in the Society, which regards the provinces with reverent awe—omne ignotum pro magnifico—as the true source of political wisdom, which Londoners should endeavour to discover and obey. Londoners no doubt see little of organised labour, and even less of industrial co-operation: the agricultural labourer is to them almost a foreigner: the Welsh miner belongs to another race. But the business men, the professional class, and the political organisers of Manchester and Glasgow have, in my opinion, no better intuitions, and usually less knowledge than their equivalents in London, and they have the disadvantage of comparative isolation. London, the brain of the Empire, where reside the leaders in politics and in commerce, in literature, in journalism and in art, and which consequently attracts the young men who aspire to be the next generation of leaders, where too are stationed all the higher ranks of Civil Service, is different in kind, as well as in size, from other cities. New thought on social subjects is almost always the product of association. Only those who live in a crowd of other thinkers know where there is room for new ideas; for it takes years for the top layer of political thought to find expression in books. Therefore the provincial thinker on social problems is always a little out of date. Except for one or two University men (e.g. Sidney Ball and Sir Oliver Lodge) practically all Fabian tract-writers have been Londoners. The local Fabian Societies have so far achieved nothing towards the making of a middle-class Socialist party, and they have achieved but little else. They have been fully justified because every association for mutual instruction adds something to the mass of political intelligence, does something to disseminate ideas, but that is all that can be said for them.

The University Societies belong to a different type. Nothing is more important than the education of young men and women in politics, and the older Universities have always recognised this. Socialist Societies accordingly grew up naturally alongside Liberal and Tory Clubs, and under the shadow of the "Unions." Oxford, as we have seen, had a University Fabian Society from early days. Cambridge followed at a much later date. For years Glasgow University and University College, Aberystwyth, maintained flourishing societies. The newer Universities, dependent largely on the bounty of wealthy capitalist founders and supporters, and assisted by, or in close touch with, town councils and local industries, have been much less willing to sanction political free-thought amongst their undergraduates, and the pernicious influence of wealth, or rather the fear of alarming the wealthy, has at times induced the authorities to interfere with the freedom of the undergraduates to combine for the study and propaganda of Socialism.

Undergraduate societies are composed of a constantly shifting population, and we arranged from the first that all their members should also be elected direct to the parent Society in order that they might remain automatically in membership when they "go down." In fact of course the percentage which retains its membership is very small. "Men" and women at Universities join any organisation whose leaders at the moment are influential and popular. They are sampling life to discover what suits them, and a few years later some of them are scattered over the globe, others immersed in science or art, or wholly occupied in law and medicine, in the church and the army, in the civil service and in journalism. Most of them no doubt have ceased to pretend to take interest in social and political reform. A few remain, and these are amongst the most valuable of our members. At times, when an undergraduate of force of character and high social position, the heir to a peerage for example, is for the moment an ardent Socialist, the Fabian Society becomes, in a certain set or college, the fashionable organisation. On the whole it is true that Socialists are born and not made, and very few of the hundreds who join at such periods stay for more than a couple of years. The maximum University membership—on paper—was in 1914, when it reached 541 members, of whom 101 were at Oxford and 70 at Cambridge. But the weakness of undergraduate Socialism is indicated by the extraordinary difficulty found in paying to the parent Society the very moderate fee of a shilling a head per annum, and the effect of attempting to enforce this in 1915, combined with the propaganda of Guild Socialism, especially at Oxford, was for the moment to break up the apparently imposing array of University Fabianism.

In 1912 Clifford Allen of Cambridge formed the University Socialist Federation, which was in fact a Federation of Fabian Societies though not nominally confined to them. Mr. Allen, an eloquent speaker and admirable organiser, with most of the virtues and some of the defects of the successful propagandist, planned the foundations of the Federation on broad lines. It started a sumptuous quarterly, "The University Socialist," the contents of which by no means equalled the excellence of the print and paper. It did not survive the second number. The Federation has held several conferences, mostly at Barrow House—of which later—and issued various documents. Its object is to encourage University Socialism and to found organisations in every University. It still exists, but whether it will survive the period of depression which has coincided with the war remains to be seen.

Lastly, amongst the organs of Fabian activity come the London Groups. In the years of rapid growth that followed the publication of "Fabian Essays" the London Groups maintained a fairly genuine existence. London was teeming with political lectures, and in the decade 1889-1899 its Government was revolutionised by the County Councils Act of 1888, the Local Government Act of 1894, and the London Government Act of 1899 which established the Metropolitan Boroughs. Socialism, too, was a novelty, and the few who knew about it were in request.

Anyway even with the small membership of those days, the London Groups managed to persist, and "Fabian News" is full of reports of conferences of Group Secretaries and accounts of Group activities. In the trough of depression between the South African War and the Liberal victory of 1906 all this disappeared and the Group system scarcely existed even on paper.

With the expansion which began in 1906 the Groups revived. New members were hungry for lectures: many of them desired more opportunities to talk than the Society meetings afforded. All believed in or hoped for Mr. Wells' myriad membership. He himself was glad to address drawing-room meetings, and the other leaders did the same. Moreover the Society was conducting a series of "Suburban Lectures" by paid lecturers, in more or less middle-class residential areas of the Home Counties. Lectures to the Leisured Classes, a polite term for the idle rich, were arranged with considerable success in the West End, and other lectures, meetings, and social gatherings were incessant.

For co-ordinating these various bodies the Fabian Society has created its own form of organisation fitted to its peculiar circumstances, and more like that of the British Empire than anything else known to me. As is the United Kingdom in the British Empire, so in the Fabian movement the parent Society is larger, richer, and more powerful, and in all respects more important than all the others put together. Any form of federal organisation is impossible, because federation assumes some approach to equality amongst constituents. Our local societies, like the British self-governing Dominions, are practically independent, especially in the very important department of finance. The Groups, on the other hand, are like County Councils, local organisations within special areas for particular purposes, with their own finances for those purposes only. But the parent Society is not made up of Groups, any more than the British Government is composed of County Councils. The local Groups consist of members of the Society qualified for the group by residence in the group area; the "Subject Groups" of those associated for some particular purpose.

The problem of the Society (as it is of the Empire) was to give the local societies and the groups some real function which should emphasise and sustain the solidarity of the whole; and at the same time leave unimpaired the control of the parent Society over its own affairs.

The Second Annual Conference of Fabian Societies and Groups was held on July 6th, 1907, under the chairmanship of Hubert Bland, who opened the proceedings with an account of the first Conference held in 1892 and described in an earlier chapter. Fifteen delegates from 9 local and University Societies, 16 from 8 London Groups, 8 from Subject Groups, and 9 members of the Executive Committee were present. The business consisted of the sanction of rules for the Pan-Fabian Organisation.

The Conference of 1908 was a much bigger affair. A dozen members of the Executive, including Mr. H.G. Wells and (as he then was) Mr. L.G. Chiozza Money. M.P., and 61 delegates representing 36 Groups and Societies met for a whole-day conference at University Hall, Gordon Square. Miss Murby was chairman, and addressed the delegates on the importance of tolerance, an apposite subject in view of the discussion to follow on the proposed parliamentary action, especially the delicate issue between co-operation with the Labour Party and the promotion of a purely Socialist party. A resolution favouring exclusive support of independent Socialist candidatures moved by Mr. J.A. Allan of Glasgow received only 10 votes, but another advocating preference for such candidates was only defeated by 26 to 21. The resolution adopted left the question to be settled in each case by the constituency concerned. Another resolution directed towards condemnation of members who worked with the Liberal or Tory Party failed by 3 votes only, 17 to 20. In the afternoon Mr. Money gave an address on the Sources of Socialist Revenue, and a number of administrative matters were discussed.

The 1909 Conference was attended by 29 delegates of local and University Societies, and by 46 delegates from London Groups and from the parent Society. On this occasion a Constitution was adopted giving the Conference a regular status, the chief provisions of which required the submission to the Conference of any alteration of the Basis, and "any union affiliation or formal alliance with any other society or with any political party whereby the freedom of action of any society ... is in any way limited ... "; and of any change in the constitution itself. These are all matters which concern the local organisations, as they are required to adopt the Basis, or some approved equivalent, and are affiliated to the Labour Party through the parent Society. No contentious topic was on this occasion seriously discussed.

The Conference of 1910 was smaller, sixty-one delegates in all. Resolutions against promoting parliamentary candidatures and favouring the by this time vanishing project for an independent Socialist party obtained but little support, and the chief controversy was over an abstract resolution on the "economic independence of women," which was in the end settled by a compromise drafted by Sidney Webb.

Sixty delegates were present at the 1911 Conference, held at Clifford's Inn, who, after rejecting by a seven to one majority a resolution to confine Fabian membership to Labour Party adherents, devoted themselves mainly to opposition to the National Insurance Bill then before Parliament.

In 1912 the Conference was still large and still concerned in the position of the Society in relation to Labour and Liberalism.

Both in 1913 and in 1914 the Conference was well attended and prolonged, but in 1915, partly on account of the war and partly because of the defection of several University Societies, few were present, and the business done was inconsiderable.

***

The Summer School was another enterprise started at the period. It was begun independently of the Society in this sense, that half a dozen members agreed to put up the necessary capital and to accept the financial responsibility, leaving to the Society the arrangement of lectures and the management of business.

It was opened at the end of July, 1907, at Pen-yr-allt, a large house, previously used as a school, looking out over the sea, near Llanbedr, a little village on the Welsh coast between Barmouth and Harlech. The house was taken for three years partly furnished, and the committee provided the beds, cutlery, etc., needed. One or two other houses near by were usually rented for the summer months.

The value of the plan for a propagandist society is largely this, that experience shows that people can only work together efficiently when they know each other. Therefore in practice political and many other organisations find it necessary to arrange garden parties, fêtes, picnics, teas, and functions of all sorts in order to bring together their numbers under such conditions as enable them to become personally acquainted with each other. In times of expansion the Fabian Society has held dinners and soirées in London, many of which have been successful and even brilliant occasions, because the new members come in crowds and the old attend as a duty. When new members are few these entertainments cease, for nothing is so dreary as a social function that is half failure, and a hint of it brings the series to an end. But a Summer School where members pass weeks together is far more valuable in enabling the leaders and officials to find out who there is who is good as a speaker or thinker, or who is a specialist on some subject of value to the movement. Moreover, gatherings of this class attract those on the fringe of the movement, and many of our members have come to us through attendance at the school. Apart from the direct interests of the Society, a School of this character is valued by many solitary people, solitary both socially, such as teachers and civil servants, who are often lonely in the world, and solitary intellectually because they live in remote places where people of their way of thinking are scarce.

It is not necessary to describe the arrangements of the School, for these institutions have in the last few years become familiar to everybody. We do not, however, as a rule make quite such a business of the schooling as is usual where the term is short, and study is the sole object. One regular lecture a day for four days a week is the rule, but impromptu lectures or debates in the evenings, got up amongst the guests, are customary. Moreover, frequent conferences on special subjects are held, either by allied bodies, such as the Committee for the Prevention of Destitution, or by a Group, such as the Education Group or the Research Department. On these occasions the proportion of work to play is higher. The School-house belongs to the Society for the whole year, and parties are arranged for Christmas, Easter, and Whitsuntide whenever possible.

After four years at Llanbedr the lease was terminated and the original Committee wound up. The capital borrowed had all been repaid, and there remained, after a sale by auction, a lot of property and nearly £100 in cash. This the Committee transferred to the Society, and thereupon the quasi-independence of the Summer School came to an end. In 1911 a new experiment was tried. A small hotel at Saas Grund, off the Rhone Valley, was secured, and during six weeks three large parties of Fabians occupied it for periods of a fortnight each. The summer was one of the finest of recent years, and the high mountains were exceptionally attractive. On account of the remoteness of the place, and the desire to make the most of a short time, lectures were as a rule confined to the evening, and distinguished visitors were few, but an address by Dr. Hertz of Paris, one of the few French Fabians, may be mentioned, partly because in the summer of 1915 his promising career was cut short in the trenches which protected his country from the German invaders.

In 1912 Barrow House, Derwentwater, was taken for three years, a beautiful place with the Barrow Falls in the garden on one side, and grounds sloping down to the lake on the other, with its own boating pier and bathing-place. A camp of tents for men was set up, and as many as fifty or sixty guests could be accommodated at a time. Much of the success of the School has throughout been due to Miss Mary Hankinson, who from nearly the beginning has been a most popular and efficient manager. A director is selected by the Committee to act as nominal head, and holds office usually for a week or a fortnight; but the chief of staff is a permanent institution, and is not only business manager, but also organiser and leader of excursions and a principal figure in all social undertakings. A great part in arranging for the School from the first has been taken by Dr. Lawson Dodd, to whose experience and energy much of its success has been due.

***

The year 1911 saw the formation of the Joint Standing Committee with the I.L.P., and this is a convenient place to describe the series of attempts at Socialist Unity which began a long way back in the history of the Society. For the first eight years or so of the Socialist movement the problem of unity did not arise. Until the publication of "Fabian Essays" the Fabian Society was small, and the S.D.F., firm in its Marxian faith, and confident that the only way of salvation was its particular way, had no more idea of uniting with the other societies than the Roman Catholic Church has of union with Lutherans or Methodists. The Socialist League was the outcome of an internal dispute, and, if my memory is correct, the S.D.F. expected, not without reason, that the seceders would ultimately return to the fold. The League ceased to count when at the end of 1890 William Morris left it and reconstituted as the Hammersmith Socialist Society the branch which met in the little hall constructed out of the stable attached to Kelmscott House.

In January, 1893, seven delegates from this Society held a conference with Fabian delegates, and at a second meeting at which S.D.F. delegates were present a scheme for promoting unity was approved. A Joint Committee of five from each body assembled on February 23rd, when William Morris was appointed Chairman, with Sydney Olivier as Treasurer, and it was decided that the Chairman with H.M. Hyndman and Bernard Shaw should draft a Joint Manifesto. The "Manifesto of English Socialists," published on May 1st, 1893, as a penny pamphlet with the customary red cover, was signed by the three Secretaries, H.W. Lee of the S.D.F., Emery Walker of the H.S.S., and myself, and by fifteen delegates, including Sydney Olivier and Sidney Webb of the F.S., Harry Quelch of the S.D.F., and the three authors.

Like most joint productions of clever men, it is by no means an inspiring document. The less said, the less to dispute about, and so it only runs to eight pages of large print, four devoted to the evils of capitalism, unemployment, the decline of agriculture, and the ill-nurture of children, and the rest to remedies, a queer list, consisting of:—

An eight hours law.
Prohibition of child labour for wages.

Free Maintenance for all necessitous children (a compromise in which Fabian influence may be traced by the insertion of the word "necessitous").

Equal payment of men and women for equal work.

(A principle which, whether good or bad, belongs rather to individualism than to Socialism: Socialism according to Bernard Shaw—and most of us agree with him—demands as an ideal equal maintenance irrespective of work; and in the meantime payment according to need, each to receive that share of the national product which he requires in order to do his work and maintain his dependents, if any, appropriately.)

To resume the programme:—

An adequate minimum wage for all adults employed in Government and Municipal services or in any monopolies such as railways enjoying State privileges.
Suppression of all sub-contracting and sweating (an ignorant confusion between a harmless industrial method and its occasional abuse).

Universal suffrage for all adults, men and women alike.

Public payment for all public service.

These of course were only means tending towards the ideal, "to wit, the supplanting of the present state by a society of equality of condition," and then follows a sentence paraphrased from the Fabian Basis embodying a last trace of that Utopian idealism which imagines that society can be constituted so as to enable men to live in freedom without eternal vigilance, namely, "When this great change is completely carried out, the genuine liberty of all will be secured by the free play of social forces with much less coercive interference than the present system entails."

From these extracts it will be seen that the Manifesto, drafted by William Morris, but mutilated and patched up by the other two, bears the imprint neither of his style, nor that of Shaw, but reminds one rather of mid-Victorian dining-room furniture, solid, respectable, heavily ornate, and quite uninteresting. Happily there is not much of it!

Unity was attained by the total avoidance of the contentious question of political policy. But fifteen active Socialists sitting together at a period when parties were so evenly divided that a General Election was always imminent could not refrain from immediate politics, and the S.D.F., like many other bodies, always cherished the illusion that the defeat of a minority at a joint conference on a question of principle would put that minority out of action.

Accordingly, as soon as the Manifesto had been published resolutions were tabled pledging the constituent societies to concentrate their efforts on Socialist candidates accepted as suitable by the Joint Committee. On this point the Fabian Society was in a hopeless minority, and an endless vista of futile and acrimonious discussions was opened out which would lead to unrest in our own society—for there has always been a minority opposed to its dominant policy—and a waste of time and temper to the delegates from our Executive. It was therefore resolved at the end of July that our delegates be withdrawn, and that put an end to the Joint Committee.

The decision was challenged at a members' meeting by E.E. Williams, one of the signatories of the Joint Manifesto, subsequently well known as the author of "Made in Germany," and in some sense the real founder of the Tariff Reform movement; but the members by a decisive vote upheld the action of their Executive.

Four years later, early in 1897, another effort after Unity was made. By this time Morris, whose outstanding personality had given him a commanding and in some respects a moderating influence in the movement, was dead; and the Hammersmith Socialist Society had disappeared. Instead there was the new and vigorous Independent Labour Party, already the premier Socialist body in point of public influence. This body took the first step, and a meeting was held in April at the Fabian office, attended by Hubert Bland, Bernard Shaw, and myself as delegates from our Society. The proposal before the Conference was "the formation of a court of appeal to adjudicate between rival Socialist candidates standing for the same seat at any contested election," an occurrence which has in fact been rare in local and virtually unknown in Parliamentary elections.

As the Fabian Society did not at that time officially run candidates, and has always allowed to its members liberty of action in party politics, it was impossible for us to undertake that our members would obey any such tribunal. The difficulty was however solved by the S.D.F., whose delegates to the second meeting, held in July, announced that they were instructed to withdraw from the Committee if the Fabian delegates remained. The I.L.P. naturally preferred the S.D.F. to ourselves, because their actual rivalry was always with that body, and we were only too glad to accept from others the dismissal which we desired. So our delegates walked out, leaving the other two parties in temporary possession of our office, and Socialist Unity so far as we were concerned again vanished. I do not think that the court of appeal was ever constituted, and certainly the relations between the other two Societies continued to be difficult.

The next move was one of a practical character. The Fabian Society had always taken special interest in Local Government, as a method of obtaining piecemeal Socialism, and had long acted as an informal Information Bureau on the law and practice of local government administration. The success of the I.L.P. in getting its members elected to local authorities suggested a conference of such persons, which was held at Easter, 1899, on the days preceding the I.L.P. Annual Conference at Leeds. Sidney Webb was invited to be President, and gave an address on "The Sphere of Municipal Statesmanship"; Will Crooks was Chairman of the Poor Law Section. At this Conference it was resolved to form a Local Government Information Bureau, to be jointly managed by the I.L.P. and the Fabian Society; it was intended for Labour members of local authorities, but anybody could join on payment of the annual subscription of 2s. 6d. For this sum the subscriber obtained the right to have questions answered free of charge, and to receive both "Fabian News" and the official publications of the I.L.P., other than their weekly newspaper. The Bureau also published annual Reports, at first on Bills before Parliament, and latterly abstracts of such Acts passed by Parliament as were of interest to its members. It pursued an uneventful but useful career, managed virtually by the secretaries of the two societies, which divided the funds annually in proportion to the literature supplied. Several Easter Conferences of Elected Persons were held with varying success. Later on the nominal control was handed over to the Joint Committee, next to be described.

The problem of Socialist Unity seemed to be approaching a settlement when the three organisations, in 1900, joined hands with the Trade Unions in the formation of the Labour Representation Committee, later renamed the Labour Party. But in 1901, eighteen months after the Committee was constituted, the S.D.F. withdrew, and thereafter unity became more difficult than ever, since two societies were united for collective political action with the numerically and financially powerful trade unions, whilst the third took up the position of hostile isolation. But between the Fabian Society and the I.L.P. friendly relations became closer than ever. The divergent political policies of the two, the only matter over which they had differed, had been largely settled by change of circumstances. The Fabian Society had rightly held that the plan of building up an effective political party out of individual adherents to any one society was impracticable, and the I.L.P. had in fact adopted another method, the permeation of existing organisations, the Trade Unions. On the other hand the Fabian Society, which at first confined its permeation almost entirely to the Liberal Party, because this was the only existing organisation accessible—we could not work through the Trade Unions, because we were not eligible to join them—was perfectly willing to place its views before the Labour Party, from which it was assured of sympathetic attention. Neither the Fabian Society nor the I.L.P. desired to lose its identity, or to abandon its special methods. But half or two-thirds of the Fabians belonged also to the I.L.P., and nearly all the I.L.P. leaders were or had been members of the Fabian Society.

The suggestion was made in March, 1911, by Henry H. Slesser, then one of the younger members of the Executive, that the friendly relations of the two bodies should be further cemented by the formation of a Joint Standing Committee. Four members of each Executive together with the secretaries were appointed, and W.C. Anderson, later M.P. for the Attercliffe Division of Sheffield, and at that time Chairman of the I.L.P., was elected Chairman, a post which he has ever since retained. The Joint Committee has wisely confined its activities to matters about which there was no disagreement, and its proceedings have always been harmonious to the verge of dullness. The Committee began by arranging a short series of lectures, replacing for the time the ordinary Fabian meetings, and it proposed to the Labour Party a demonstration in favour of Adult Suffrage, which was successfully held at the Royal Albert Hall.

In the winter of 1912-13 the Joint Committee co-operated with the National Committee for the Prevention of Destitution (of which later) in a big War against Poverty Campaign, to demand a minimum standard of civilised life for all. A demonstration at the Albert Hall, a Conference at the Memorial Hall, twenty-nine other Conferences throughout Great Britain, all attended by numerous delegates from Trade Unions and other organisations, and innumerable separate meetings were among the activities of the Committee. In 1913 a large number of educational classes were arranged. In the winter of 1913-14 the I.L.P. desired to concentrate its attention on its own "Coming of Age Campaign," an internal affair, in which co-operation with another body was inappropriate. A few months later the War began and, for reasons explained later, joint action remains for the time in abeyance.

It will be convenient to complete the history of the movements for Socialist Unity, though it extends beyond the period assigned to this chapter, and we must now turn back to the beginning of another line of action.

The International Socialist and Trade Union Congresses held at intervals of three or four years since 1889 were at first no more than isolated Congresses, arranged by local organisations constituted for the purpose in the preceding year. Each nation voted as one, or at most, as two units, and therefore no limit was placed on the number of its delegates: the one delegate from Argentina or Japan consequently held equal voting power to the scores or even hundreds from France or Germany. But gradually the organisation was tightened up, and in 1907 a scheme was adopted which gave twenty votes each to the leading nations, and proportionately fewer to the others. Moreover a permanent Bureau was established at Brussels, with Emile Vandervelde, the distinguished leader of the Belgian Socialists, later well known in England as the Ministerial representative of the Belgian Government during the war, as Chairman. In England, where the Socialist and Trade Union forces were divided, it was necessary to constitute a special joint committee in order to raise the British quota of the cost of the Bureau, and to elect and instruct the British delegates. It was decided by the Brussels Bureau that the 20 British votes should be allotted, 10 to the Labour Party, 4 to the I.L.P., 4 to the British Socialist Party (into which the old S.D.F. had merged), and 2 to the Fabian Society, and the British Section of the International Socialist Bureau was, and still remains, constituted financially and electorally on that basis.

In France and in several other countries the internal differences between sections of the Socialist Party have been carried to far greater lengths than have ever been known in England. In France there have been hostile groups of Socialist representatives in the Chamber of Deputies and constant internecine opposition in electoral campaigns. In Great Britain the rivalry of different societies has consisted for the most part in separate schemes of propaganda, in occasional bickerings in their publications, in squabbles over local elections, and sometimes over the selection but not the election of parliamentary candidates. On the other hand co-operation on particular problems and exchange of courtesies have been common.

The International Socialist Bureau, under instructions from the Copenhagen Conference had made a successful attempt to unite the warring elements of French Socialism, and in the autumn of 1912 the three British Socialist Societies were approached with a view to a conference with the Bureau on the subject of Socialist unity in Great Britain. Convenient dates could not be fixed, and the matter was dropped, but in July, 1913, M. Vandervelde, the Chairman, and M. Camille Huysmans, the Secretary of the Bureau, came over from Brussels and a hurried meeting of delegates assembled in the Fabian office to discuss their proposals. The Bureau had the good sense to recognise that the way to unity led through the Labour Party; and it was agreed that the three Socialist bodies should form a United Socialist Council, subject to the condition that the British Socialist Party should affiliate to the Labour Party.

In December, 1913, a formal conference was held in London, attended on this occasion by all the members of the International Socialist Bureau, representing the Socialist parties of twenty different countries. The crux of the question was to find a form of words which satisfied all susceptibilities; and Sidney Webb, who was chosen chairman of a part of the proceedings when the British delegates met by themselves to formulate the terms of agreement, was here in his element; for it would be hard to find anybody in England more skilful in solving the difficulties that arise in determining the expression of a proposition of which the substance is not in dispute.

An agreement was arrived at that the Joint Socialist Council should be formed as soon as the British Socialist Party was affiliated to the Labour Party. The B.S.P. confirmed the decision of its delegates, but the Labour Party referred the acceptance of affiliation to the Annual Conference of 1915[39].

Then came the War. The Labour Party Conference of 1915 did not take place, and a sudden new divergence of opinion arose in the Socialist movement. The Labour Party, the Fabian Society, and the leaders of the B.S.P. gave general support to the Government in entering into the war. The I.L.P. adopted an attitude of critical hostility. Amidst this somewhat unexpected regrouping of parties, any attempt to inaugurate a United Socialist Council was foredoomed to failure. The project for Socialist Unity therefore awaits the happy time when war shall have ceased.

_______________

Notes:

[39] The Labour Party Conference held in January, 1916, unanimously accepted the affiliation of the British Socialist Party.
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Re: THE HISTORY OF THE FABIAN SOCIETY, by Edward R. Pease

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Chapter 11: The Minority Report, Syndicalism and Research: 1909-15

The emergence of Mrs. Sidney Webb—The Poor Law Commission—The Minority Report—Unemployment—The National Committee for the Prevention of Destitution—"Vote against the House of Lords"—Bernard Shaw retires—Death of Hubert Bland—Opposition to the National Insurance Bill—The Fabian Reform Committee—The "New Statesman"—The Research Department—"The Rural Problem"—"The Control of Industry"—Syndicalism—The Guildsmen—Final Statistics—The War.

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MRS. SIDNEY WEBB, IN 1909

A former chapter was entitled "The Episode of Mr. Wells." The present might have been called "The Intervention of Mrs. Sidney Webb," save for the fact that it would suggest a comparison which might be misleading.

I have insisted with some iteration that the success of the Society, both in its early days and afterwards, must be mainly attributed to the exceptional force and ability of the Essayists. Later in its history only two persons have come forward who are in my opinion entitled in their Fabian work to rank with the original leaders, to wit, Mr. Wells and Mrs. Webb. Of the former I have said enough already. The present chapter will be largely devoted to the influence of the latter.

It must however be observed that in all their achievements it is impossible to make a clear distinction between Mrs. Webb and her husband. For example, the Minority Report of the Poor Law Commission, shortly to be dealt with, purported to be the work of Mrs. Webb and her three co-signatories. In fact the investigation, the invention, and the conclusions were in the fullest sense joint, although the draft which went to the typist was in the handwriting of Mr. Webb. On some occasions at any rate Mrs. Webb lectures from notes in her husband's eminently legible handwriting: her own—oddly unlike her character—is indecipherable without prolonged scrutiny even by herself. Sometimes, on the other hand, it is possible to separate the work of the two. Mrs. Webb, although elected a member in 1893, took practically no part in the Fabian Society until 1906. It may be said, with substantial if not literal accuracy, that her only contributions to the Society for the first dozen years of her membership were a couple of lectures and Tract No. 67, "Women and the Factory Acts." The Suffrage movement and the Wells episode brought her to our meetings, and her lecture in "The Faith I Hold" series, a description of her upbringing amongst the captains of industry who built some of the world's great railways, was amongst the most memorable in the long Fabian series. Still she neither held nor sought any official position; and the main work of a Society is necessarily done by the few who sit at its Committees often twice or thrice a week.

The transformation of Mrs. Webb from a student and writer, a typical "socialist of the chair," into an active leader and propagandist originated in December, 1905, when she was appointed a member of the Royal Commission on the Poor Law. The Fabian Society had nothing to do with the Commission during its four years of enquiry, though as usual not a few Fabians took part in the work, both officially and unofficially. But when in the spring of 1909 the Minority Report was issued, signed by Mrs. Webb and George Lansbury, both members of the Society, as well as by the Rev. Russell Wakefield (now the Bishop of Birmingham) and Mr. F. Chandler, Secretary of the Amalgamated Society of Carpenters and Joiners, the Society took it up. Mr. and Mrs. Webb reprinted the Minority Report with an introduction and notes in two octavo volumes, and they lent the Society the plates for a paper edition in two parts at a shilling and two shillings, one dealing with Unemployment and the other with the reconstruction of the Poor Law, some 6000 copies of which were sold at a substantial profit.

The Treasury Solicitor was rash enough to threaten us with an injunction on the ground of infringement of the Crown copyright and to demand an instant withdrawal of our edition. But Government Departments which try conclusions with the Fabian Society generally find the Society better informed than themselves; and we were able triumphantly to refer the Treasury Solicitor to a published declaration of his own employers, the Lords Commissioners of the Treasury, a score of years before, in which they expressly disclaimed their privilege of copyright monopoly so far as ordinary blue books were concerned, and actually encouraged the reprinting of them for the public advantage. And, with characteristic impudence, we intimated also that, if the Government wished to try the issue, it might find that the legal copyright was not in the Crown at all, as the actual writer of the Report, to whom alone the law gives copyright, had never ceded his copyright and was not a member of the Royal Commission at all! At the same time we prepared to get the utmost advertisement out of the attempt to suppress the popular circulation of the Report, and we made this fact known to the Prime Minister. In the end the Treasury Solicitor had to climb down and withdraw his objection. What the Government did was to undercut us by publishing a still cheaper edition, which did not stop our sales, and thus the public benefited by our enterprise, and an enormous circulation was obtained for the Report.

The Minority Report of the Poor Law Commission—although never, from first to last, mentioning Socialism—was a notable and wholly original addition to Socialist theory, entirely of Fabian origin. Hitherto all Socialist writings on the organisation of society, whether contemporary or Utopian, had visualised a world composed exclusively of healthy, sane, and effective citizens, mostly adults. No Socialist had stopped to think out how, in a densely populated and highly industrialised Socialist community, we should provide systematically for the orphans, the sick, the physically or mentally defective and the aged on the one hand, and for the adults for whom at any time no immediate employment could be found. The Minority Report, whilst making immediately practicable proposals for the reform of all the evils of the Poor Law, worked out the lines along which the necessary organisation must proceed, even in the fully socialised State. We had, in the Fabian Society, made attempts to deal with both sides of this problem; but our publications, both on the Poor Law and on the Unemployed, had lacked the foundation of solid fact and the discovery of new principles, which the four years' work of the Fabians connected with the Poor Law Commission now supplied.

English Socialists have always paid great and perhaps excessive attention to the problem of unemployment. Partly this is due to the fact that Socialism came to the front in Great Britain at a period when unemployment was exceptionally rife, and when for the first time in the nineteenth century the community had become acutely aware of it. In our early days it was commonly believed to be a rapidly growing evil. Machinery was replacing men: the capitalists would employ a few hands to turn the machines on and off: wealth would be produced for the rich, and most of the present manual working class would become superfluous. The only reply, so far as I know, to this line of argumentative forecast is that it does not happen. The world is at present so avid of wealth, so eager for more things to use or consume, that however quickly iron and copper replace flesh and blood, the demand for men keeps pace with it. Anyway, unemployment in the twentieth century has so far been less prevalent than it was in the nineteenth, and nobody now suggests, as did Mrs. Besant in 1889, that the increasing army of the unemployed, provided with work by the State, would ultimately oust the employees of private capitalism. Unemployment in fact is at least as old as the days of Queen Elizabeth, when the great Poor Law of 1601 was passed to cope with it. Whilst labour was scattered and the artisan still frequently his own master, unemployment was indefinite and relatively imperceptible. When masses of men and women came to be employed in factories, the closing of the factory made unemployment obvious to those on the spot. But two generations ago Lancashire and Yorkshire were far away from London, and the nation as a whole knew little and cared less about hard times amongst cotton operatives or iron-workers in the remote north.

It may be said with fair accuracy that Unemployment was scarcely recognised as a social problem before the last quarter of the nineteenth century, though in fact it had existed for centuries, and had been prevalent for fifty years. Mill in his "Political Economy," which treats so sympathetically of the state of labour under capitalism, has no reference to it in the elaborate table of contents. Indeed the word unemployment is so recent as to have actually been unknown before the early nineties[40].

But the Trade Unionists had always been aware of unemployment, since, after strike pay, it is "out-of-work benefit" which they have found the best protection for the standard rate of wages, and nothing in the program of Socialism appealed to them more directly than its claim to abolish unemployment. Finally it may be said that unemployment is on the whole more prevalent in Great Britain than elsewhere; the system of casual or intermittent employment is more widespread; throughout the Continent the working classes in towns are nearly everywhere connected with the rural peasant landowners or occupiers, so that the town labourer can often go back to the land at any rate for his keep; whilst all America, still predominantly agricultural, is in something like a similar case.

The Fabian Society had since its earliest days been conscious of the problem of unemployment; but it had done little to solve it. The "Report on the Government Organisation of Unemployed Labour," printed "for the information of members" in 1886, had been long forgotten, and an attempt to revise it made some time in the nineties had come to nothing. In "Fabian Essays" unemployment is rightly recognised as the Achilles heel of the proletarian system, but the practical problem is not solved or even thoroughly understood; the plausible error of supposing that the unemployed baker and bootmaker can be set to make bread and boots for one another still persists. In 1893 we reprinted from the "Nineteenth Century" as Tract No. 47 a paper on "The Unemployed" by John Burns, and we had published nothing else.

In fact we found the subject too difficult. There were plenty of palliatives familiar to every social enquirer; Socialism, the organisation of industry by the community for the community, we regarded as the real and final remedy. But between the former, such as labour bureaux, farm colonies, afforestation, the eight hours day, which admittedly were at best only partial and temporary, and Socialism, which was obviously far off, there was a great gulf fixed, and how to bridge it we knew not. At last the Minority Report provided an answer. It was a comprehensive and practicable scheme for preventing unemployment under existing conditions, and for coping with the mass of incompetent destitution which for generations had Been the disgrace of our civilisation.

Into the details of this scheme I must not enter because it is, properly speaking, outside the scope of this book. The propaganda for carrying the Report into effect was undertaken by the National Committee for the Prevention of Destitution, established by Mrs. Webb as a separate organisation. The necessity for this step was significant of the extent to which Socialism, as it crystallises into practical measures, invades the common body of British thought. People who would not dream of calling themselves Socialists, much less contributing to the funds of a Socialist Society, become enthusiastically interested in separate parts of its program as soon as it has a program, provided these parts are presented on their own merits and not as approaches to Socialism. Indeed many who regard Socialism as a menace to society are so anxious to find and support alternatives to it, that they will endow expensive Socialistic investigations and subscribe to elaborate Socialistic schemes of reform under the impression that nothing that is thoughtful, practical, well informed, and constitutional can possibly have any connection with the Red Spectre which stands in their imagination for Socialism. To such people the Minority Report, a document obviously the work of highly skilled and disinterested political thinkers and experts, would recommend itself as the constitutional basis of a Society for the Prevention of Destitution: that is, of the condition which not only smites the conscientious rich with a compunction that no special pleading by arm-chair economists can allay, but which offers a hotbed to the sowers of Socialism. Add to these the considerable number of convinced or half-convinced Socialists who for various reasons are not in a position to make a definite profession of Socialism without great inconvenience, real or imaginary, to themselves, and it will be plain that Mrs. Webb would have been throwing away much of her available resources if she had not used the device of a new organisation to agitate for the Minority Report ad hoc.

Many Fabians served on the Committee—indeed a large proportion of our members must have taken part in its incessant activities—and the relations between the two bodies were close; but most of the subscribers to the Committee and many of its most active members came from outside the Society, and were in no way committed to its general principles.

For two whole years Mrs. Webb managed her Committee with great vigour and dash. She collected for it a considerable income and a large number of workers: she lectured and organised all over the country; she discovered that she was an excellent propagandist, and that what she could do with success she also did with zest.

In the summer of 1911 Mr. and Mrs. Webb left England for a tour round the world, and Mrs. Webb had mentioned before she left that she was willing to be nominated for the Executive. At the election in April, 1912, whilst still abroad, she was returned second on the poll, with 778 votes, only a dozen behind her husband.

From this point onwards Mrs. Webb has been on the whole the dominant personality in the Society This does not necessarily mean that she is abler or stronger than her husband or Bernard Shaw. But the latter had withdrawn from the Executive Committee, and the former, with the rest of the Old Gang, had made the Society what it already was. Mrs. Webb brought a fresh and fertile mind to its councils. Her twenty years of membership and intimate private acquaintance with its leaders made her familiar with its possibilities, but she was free from the influence of past failures—in such matters for example as Socialist Unity—and she was eager to start out on new lines which the almost unconscious traditions of the Society had hitherto barred.

***

The story of the Society has been traced to the conclusion of the intervention of Mr. Wells, and I then turned aside to describe the numerous new activities of the booming years which followed the Labour Party triumph of 1906. I must now complete the history of the internal affairs of the Society.

As a political body, the Society has usually, though not invariably, issued some sort of pronouncement on the eve of a General Election. In January, 1910, the Executive Committee published in "Fabian News" a brief manifesto addressed to the members urging them to "Vote against the House of Lords." It will be recollected that the Lords had rejected the Budget, and the sole issue before the country was the right of the House of Commons to control finance. Members were urged to support any duly accredited Labour or socialist candidate; elsewhere they were, in effect, advised to vote for the Liberal candidates. In April their action in publishing this "Special advice to members" without the consent of a members' meeting was challenged, but the Executive Committee's contention that it was entitled to advise the members, and that the advice given was sound, was endorsed by a very large majority.

At the Annual Meeting the Executive Committee, with a view to setting forth once more their reasoned view on a subject of perennial trouble to new members, accepted a resolution instructing them to consider and report on the advisability of limiting the liberty of members to support political parties other than Labour or Socialist, and on November 4th R.C.K. Ensor on behalf of the Executive gave an admirable address on Fabian Policy. He explained that the Society had never set out to become a political party, and that in this respect it differed in the most marked manner from most Socialist bodies. Its collective support of the Labour Party combined with toleration of Liberals suited a world of real men who can seldom be arranged on tidy and geometrical lines. This report was accepted by general consent, and in December, when Parliament was again dissolved, this time on the question of the Veto of the Lords, the Executive repeated their "Advice to Members" to vote for Liberals whenever no properly accredited Labour or Socialist candidate was in the field.

***

But the dissatisfaction with the old policy, and with its old exponents, was not yet dispelled. A new generation was knocking at the door, and some of the old leaders thought that the time had come to make room for them. Hubert Bland was suffering from uncertain health, and he made up his mind to retire from the official positions he had held since the formation of the Society. Bernard Shaw determined to join him and then suggested the same course to the rest of his contemporaries. Some of them concurred, and in addition to the two already named R.C.K. Ensor (who returned a year later), Stewart Headlam, and George Standring withdrew from the Executive in order to make room for younger members. Twenty-two new candidates came forward at the election of April, 1911; but on the whole the Society showed no particular eagerness for change. The retiring members were re-elected ahead of all the new ones, with Sidney Webb at the top of the poll, and the five additions to the Executive, Emil Davies, Mrs. C.M. Wilson, Reginald Bray, L.C.C., Mrs. F. Cavendish Bentinck, and Henry D. Harben, were none of them exactly youthful or ardent innovators.

By this time it was apparent that the self-denying ordinance of the veterans was not really necessary, and the Executive, loath to lose the stimulation of Shaw's constant presence, devised a scheme to authorise the elected members to co-opt as consultative members persons who had already held office for ten years and had retired. The Executive itself was by no means unanimous on this policy, and at the Annual Meeting one of them, Henry H. Slesser, led the opposition to any departure from "the principles of pure democracy." On a show of hands the proposal appeared to be defeated by a small majority, and in the face of the opposition was withdrawn. This is almost the only occasion on which the Executive Committee have failed to carry their policy through the Society, and they might have succeeded even in this instance, either at the meeting or on a referendum, if they had chosen to insist on an alteration in the constitution against the wishes of a substantial fraction of the membership.

Here then it may be said that the rule of the essayists as a body came to an end. Sidney Webb alone remained in office. Hubert Bland was in rapidly declining health. Only once again he addressed the Society, on July 16th, 1912, when he examined the history of "Fabian Policy," and indicated the changes which he thought should be made to adapt it to new conditions. Soon after this his sight completely failed, and in April, 1914, he died suddenly of long-standing heart disease.

Bernard Shaw happily for the Society has not ceased to concern himself in its activities, although he is no longer officially responsible for their management. His freedom from office does not always make the task of his successors easier. The loyalest of colleagues, he had always defended their policy, whether or not it was exactly of his own choice; but in his capacity of private member his unrivalled influence is occasionally something of a difficulty. If he does not happen to approve of what the Executive proposes he can generally persuade a Business Meeting to vote for something else!

***

At this same period, the spring of 1911, the National Insurance Bill was introduced. This was a subject to which the Society had given but little attention and on which it had not formulated a policy. It had opposed the contributory system as proposed to be applied to Old Age Pensions, and a paper on "Paupers and Old Age Pensions," published by Sidney Webb in the "Albany Review" in August, 1907, and reprinted by the Society as Tract No. 135, had probably much influence in deciding the Government to abandon its original plan of excluding paupers permanently from the scheme by showing what difficulties and anomalies would follow from any such course. The National Insurance Bill when first introduced was severely criticised by Sidney Webb in documents circulated amongst Trade Unionists and published in various forms; but a few weeks later he started on his tour round the world and could take no further part in the affair. At the Annual Conference of Fabian Societies in July, 1911, an amendment proposed by H.D. Harben to a resolution dealing with the Bill was carried against a small minority. The amendment declared that the Bill should be opposed, and in furtherance of the policy thus casually suggested and irregularly adopted, the Executive Committee joined with a section of the I.L.P. in a vigorous campaign to defeat the Bill. This was a new rôle for the Society. Usually it has adopted the principle of accepting and making the best of what has already happened; and in politics a Bill introduced by a strong Government is a fait accompli; it is too late to say that something else would have been preferable. It may be amended: it may possibly be withdrawn: it cannot be exchanged for another scheme.

I shall not however dwell on this episode in Fabian history because for once I was in complete disagreement with all my colleagues, except Sir Leo Chiozza Money, and perhaps I cannot yet view the matter with entire detachment. The Labour Party decided to meet the Bill with friendly criticism, to recognise it as great measure of social reform, and to advocate amendments which they deemed improvements. The Fabian Society attacked the Bill with hostile amendments, prophesied all sorts of calamities as certain to result from it: magnified its administrative difficulties, and generally encouraged the duchesses and farmers who passively resisted it; but their endeavour to defeat the Bill was a failure.

It may be too soon to be confident that the policy of the Society in this matter was wrong. But the Trade Unions are stronger than ever: the Friendly Societies are not bankrupt: the working people are insured against sickness: and anybody who now proposed to repeal the Act would be regarded as a lunatic.

***

Meanwhile the withdrawal of some of the older had by no means satisfied the younger generation, and during the autumn of 1911 a Fabian Reform Committee was constituted, with Henry H. Slesser as Chairman, Dr. Marion Phillips as Vice-Chairman, Clifford Allen as Secretary, and fifteen other members, including Dr. Ethel Bentham, who, like Mr. Slesser, was a member of the Executive. Their programme, like that of Mr. Wells, included a number of reforms of procedure, none of them of much consequence; and a political policy, which was to insist "that if Fabians do take part in politics, they should do so only as supporters of the Labour Party."[41] The campaign of the Committee lasted a year, and as usual in such cases led to a good deal of somewhat heated controversy over matters which now appear to be very trivial. It is therefore not worth while to recount the details of the proceedings, which can be found by any enquirer in the pages of "Fabian News." Two of the leaders, Dr. Marion Phillips and Clifford Allen, were elected to the Executive at the election of 1912, and some of the administrative reforms proposed by the Committee were carried into effect. The Reformers elected to fight the battle of political policy on point of detail, until in July, 1912, the Executive Committee resolved to bring the matter to an issue, and to that end moved at a members' meeting: "That this meeting endorses the constitutional practice of the Society which accords complete toleration to its members; and whilst reaffirming its loyalty to the Labour Party, to which party alone it as a society has given support, it declines to interfere ... with the right of each member to decide on the manner in which he can best work for Socialism in accordance with his individual opportunities and circumstances." (The phrase omitted refers to the rule about expulsion of members, a safeguard which in fact has never been resorted to.) An amendment of the Reformers embodying their policy was defeated by 122 to 27 and after the holiday season the Reform Committed announced that their mission was accomplished and their organisation had been disbanded[42].

"Fabian Reform" embodied no new principle all through the history of the Society there had been a conflict between the "constitutional practice" of political toleration, and the desire of a militant minority to set up a standard of party orthodoxy, and to penalise or expel the dissenters from it.

The next storm which disturbed Fabian equanimity involved an altogether new principle, and was therefore a refreshing change to the veterans, who were growing weary of winning battles fought over the same ground. In order to explain this movement it is necessary to describe a new development in the work of the Society.

In the autumn of 1912 Mrs. Webb came to the conclusion that the work of the National Committee for the Prevention of Destitution could not be carried on indefinitely on a large scale. Reform of the Poor Law was not coming as a big scheme. It was true that the Majority Report was almost forgotten, but there appeared to be no longer any hope that the Government would take up as a whole the scheme of the Minority Report. It would come about in due time, but not as the result of an agitation. The National Committee had a monthly paper, "The Crusade," edited by Clifford Sharp, a member of the Society who came to the front at the time of the Wells agitation, had been one of the founders of the Nursery, and a member of the Executive from 1909 to 1914. In March, 1913, Bernard Shaw, H.D. Harben, and the Webbs, with a few other friends, established the "New Statesman," with Clifford Sharp as editor. This weekly review is not the organ of the Society, and is not in any formal way connected with it, but none the less it does in fact express the policy which has moulded the Society, and it has been a useful vehicle for publishing the results of Fabian Research.

Fabian Research, the other outgrowth of the Committee for the Prevention of Destitution, was organised by Mrs. Webb in the autumn of 1912. Investigation of social problems was one of the original objects of the Society and had always been a recognised part of its work. As a general rule, members had taken it up individually, but at various periods Committees had been appointed to investigate particular subjects. The important work of one of these Committees, on the Decline of the Birth-rate, has been described in an earlier chapter. Mrs. Webb's plan was to systematise research, to enlist the co-operation of social enquirers not necessarily committed to the principles of the Society, and to obtain funds for this special purpose from those who would not contribute to the political side of the Society's operations.

The "Committees of Inquiry" then formed took up two subjects, the "Control of Industry" and "Land Problems and Rural Development." The latter was organised by H.D. Harben and was carried on independently. After a large amount of information had been collected, partly in writing and partly from the oral evidence of specialists, a Report was drafted by Mr. Harben and published first as a Supplement to the "New Statesman" on August 4th, 1913, and some months later by Messrs. Constable for the Fabian Society as a half-a-crown volume entitled "The Rural Problem."

In fact there is a consensus of opinion throughout all parties on this group of questions. Socialists, Liberals, and a large section of Conservatives advocate Wages Boards for providing a statutory minimum wage for farm labourers, State aid for building of cottages and a resolute speeding up in the provision of land for small holdings. The Fabian presentment of the case did not substantially differ from that of the Land Report published a few months later under Liberal auspices, and our Report, though useful, cannot be said to have been epoch-making.

Meanwhile the Enquiry into the Control of Industry was developing on wider lines. The Research Department set up its own office and staff, and began to collect information about all the methods of control of industry at present existing as alternatives to the normal capitalist system. Co-operation in all its forms, the resistances of Trade Unionism, the effects of professional organisations, such as those of the Teachers and of the Engineers, and all varieties of State and Municipal enterprise were investigated in turn; several reports have been published as "New Statesman" Supplements, and a volume or series of volumes will in due time appear.

The problem of the Control of Industry had become important because of the rise of a new school of thought amongst Socialists, especially in France, where the rapid growth of Trade Unionism since 1884, combined with profound distrust of the group system of party politics, had led to a revival of old-fashioned anarchism in a new form. Syndicalism, which is the French word for Trade Unionism, proposes that the future State should be organised on the basis of Trade Unions; it regards a man's occupation as more vitally important to him than his place of residence, and therefore advocates representation by trades in place of localities: it lays stress on his desire, his right, to control his own working life directly through his own elected representatives of his trade: it criticises the "servile state" proposed by collectivists, wherein the workman, it is said, would be a wage-slave to officials of the State, as he is now to officials of the capitalists. Thus it proposes that the control of industry should be in the hands of the producers, and not, as at present, in the hands of consumers through capitalists catering for their custom, or through co-operative societies of consumers, or through the State acting on behalf of citizens who are consumers.

A quite extraordinary diversity of streams of opinion converged to give volume to this new trend of thought. There was the literary criticism of Mr. Hilaire Belloc, whose ideal is the peasant proprietor of France, freed from governmental control, a self-sufficient producer of all his requirements. His attack was directed against the Servile State, supposed to be foreshadowed by the Minority Report, which proposed drastic collective control over the derelicts of our present social anarchy. Then Mr. Tom Mann came back from Australia as the prophet of the new proletarian gospel, and for a few months attracted working-class attention by his energy and eloquence. The South Wales miners, after many years of acquiescence in the rule of successful and highly respected but somewhat old-fashioned leaders, were awakening to a sense of power, and demanding from their Unions a more aggressive policy. The parliamentary Labour Party since 1910 had resolved to support the Liberal Government in its contest with the House of Lords and in its demand for Irish Home Rule, and as Labour support was essential to the continuance of the Liberals in power, they were debarred from pushing their own proposals regardless of consequences. Although therefore the party was pledged to the demand for Women's Franchise, they refused to wreck the Government on its behalf. Hence impatient Socialists and extreme Suffragists united in proclaiming that the Labour Party was no longer of any use, and that "direct action" by Suffragettes and Trade Unionists was the only method of progress. The "Daily Herald," a newspaper started by a group of compositors in London, was acquired by partisans of this policy, and as long as it lived incessantly derided the Labour Party and advocated Women's Franchise and some sort of Syndicalism as the social panacea. Moreover a variant on Syndicalism, of a more reasoned and less revolutionary character, called "Guild Socialism," was proposed by Mr. A.R. Orage in the pages of his weekly, "The New Age," and gained a following especially in Oxford, where Mr. G.D.H. Cole was leader of the University Fabian Society. His book on Trade Unionism, entitled "The World of Labour," published at the end of 1913, attracted much attention, and he threw himself with great energy into the Trade Union enquiry of the Research Department, of which his friend and ally, Mr. W. Mellor, was the Secretary. Mr. Cole was elected to the Executive Committee in April, 1914, and soon afterwards began a new "Reform" movement. He had become a prophet of the "Guild Socialism" school, and was at that time extremely hostile to the Labour Party. Indeed a year before, when dissatisfaction with the party was prevalent, he had proposed at a business meeting that the Fabian Society should disaffiliate, but he had failed to carry his resolution by 92 votes against 48. In the summer of 1914 however he arrived at an understanding with Mr. Clifford Allen, also a member of the Executive, and with other out and out supporters of the Labour Party, by which they agreed to combine their altogether inconsistent policies into a single new program for the Fabian Society. The program of the "several schools of thought," published in "Fabian News" for April, 1915, laid down that the object of the Society should be to carry out research, that the Basis should be replaced merely by the phrase, "The Fabian Society consists of Socialists and forms part of the national and international movement for the emancipation of the community from the capitalist system"; and that a new rule should be adopted forbidding members to belong to, or publicly to associate with, any organisation opposed to that movement of which this Society had declared itself a part. The Executive Committee published a lengthy rejoinder, and at the election of the Executive Committee a few weeks later the members by their votes clearly indicated their disapproval of the new scheme. At the Annual Meeting in May, 1915, only small minorities supported the plan of reconstruction, and Mr. Cole then and there resigned his membership of the Society, and was subsequently followed by a few other members. A little while later the Oxford University Fabian Society severed its connection with the parent Society, and Mr. Cole adopted the wise course of founding a society of his own for the advocacy of Guild Socialism.

This episode brings the history of the Society down to the present date, and I shall conclude this chapter with a brief account of its organisation at the time of writing, the summer of 1915.

At the end of 1913 my own long term of service as chief officer of the Society came to an end, and my colleague for several previous years, W. Stephen Sanders, was appointed my successor. The Executive Committee requested me to take the new office of Honorary Secretary, and to retain a share in the management of the Society. This position I still hold.

The tide of Socialist progress which began to rise in 1905 had turned before 1914, and the period of depression was intensified by the war, which is still the dominant fact in the world. The membership of the Society reached its maximum in 1913, 2804 in the parent Society and about 500 others in local societies. In 1915 the members were 2588 and 250. The removal to new premises in the autumn of 1914 was more than a mere change of offices, since it provided the Society with a shop for the sale of its publications, a hall sufficiently large for minor meetings, and accommodation in the same house for the Research Department and the Women's Group. Moreover a couple of rooms were furnished as a "Common Room" for members, in which light refreshments can be obtained and Socialist publications consulted. The finances of the Society have of course been adversely affected by the war, but not, so far, to a very material extent.

The chief new departure of recent years has been the organisation of courses of lectures in London for the general public by Bernard Shaw, Sidney Webb, and Mrs. Webb, which have not only been of value as a means of propaganda, but have also yielded a substantial profit for the purposes of the Society. The plan originated with a debate between Bernard Shaw and G.K. Chesterton in 1911, which attracted a crowded audience and much popular interest. Next year Mr. Shaw debated with Mr. Hilaire Belloc: in 1913 Mr. and Mrs. Webb gave six lectures at King's Hall on "Socialism Restated": in 1914 Bernard Shaw gave another course of six at Kingsway Hall on the "Redistribution of Income," in which he developed the thesis that the economic goal of Socialism is equality of income for all. Lastly, in 1915 a course of six lectures at King's Hall by the three already named on "The World after the War" proved to be unexpectedly successful. The lecturing to clubs and other societies carried on by new generations of members still continues, but it forms by no means so prominent a part of the Society's work as in earlier years.

Local Fabian organisation, as is always the case in time of depression, is on the down grade. The London groups scarcely exist, and but few local societies, besides that of Liverpool, show signs of life. The Research Department, the Women's Group, and the Nursery are still active.

The Society has an old-established tradition and a settled policy, but in fact it is not now controlled by anything like an Old Gang. The Executive Committee numbers twenty-one: two only of these, Sidney Webb and myself, have sat upon it from its early days: only two others, Dr. Lawson Dodd (the Treasurer) and W. Stephen Sanders (the General Secretary) were on the Executive during the great contest with Mr. Wells ten years ago. All the rest have joined it within the last few years, and if they support the old tradition, it is because they accept it, and not because they created it. Moreover the majority of the members are young people, most of them born since the Society was founded. The Society is old, but it does not consist, in the main, of old people.

What its future may be I shall consider in the next, and concluding, chapter.

***

I must add a final paragraph to my history. At the time I write, in the first days of 1916, the war is with us and the end is not in sight. In accordance with the rule which forbids it to speak, unless it has something of value to say, the Society has made no pronouncement and adopted no policy. A resolution registering the opinion of the majority of a few hundred members assembled in a hall is not worth recording when the subject is one in which millions are as concerned and virtually as competent as themselves.

Naturally there is diversity of opinion amongst the members. On the one hand Mr. Clifford Allen, a member of the Executive, has played a leading part in organising opposition to conscription and opposing the policy of the Government. On the other hand two other members of the Executive Committee, Mr. H.J. Gillespie and Mr. C.M. Lloyd, have, since the beginning of the war, resigned their seats in order to take commissions in the Army. Another member, the General Secretary, after months of vigorous service as one of the Labour Party delegates to Lord Derby's Recruiting Committee, accepted a commission in the Army in November, 1915, in order to devote his whole time to this work, and has been granted leave of absence for the period of the war, whilst I have undertaken my old work in his place. Many members of the Society joined the Army in the early months of the war, and already a number, amongst whom may be named Rupert Brooke, have given their lives for their country.

_______________

Notes:

[40] The editors of the Oxford English Dictionary kindly inform me that the earliest quotation they have yet found is dated December, 1894. I cannot discover it in any Fabian publication before Tract No. 65, which was published in July, 1895.

[41] Manifesto on Fabian Policy issued by the Fabian Reform Committee, 4 pp., 4to, November 28th, 1911.

[42] "Fabian News," November, 1912.
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Re: THE HISTORY OF THE FABIAN SOCIETY, by Edward R. Pease

Postby admin » Tue Sep 22, 2015 5:23 am

Chapter 12: The Lessons of Thirty Years

Breaking the spell of Marxism—A French verdict—Origin of Revisionism in Germany—The British School of Socialism—Mr. Ernest Barker's summary—Mill versus Marx—The Fabian Method—Making Socialists or making Socialism—The life of propagandist societies—The prospects of Socialist Unity—The future of Fabian ideas—The test of Fabian success.

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EDWARD R. PEASE, IN 1913

The Fabian Society was founded for the purpose of reconstructing Society in accordance with the highest moral possibilities. This is still the most accurate and compendious description of its object and the nature of its work. But the stage of idealism at which more than a very modest instalment of this cosmic process seemed possible within the lifetime of a single institution had passed before the chief Essayists became members, and indeed I cannot recollect that the founders themselves ever imagined that it lay within their own power to reconstruct Society; none of them was really so sanguine or so self-confident as to anticipate so great a result from their efforts, and it will be remembered that the original phrase was altered by the insertion of the words "to help on" when the constitution was actually formulated. Society has not yet been reconstructed, but the Fabians have done something towards its reconstruction, and my history will be incomplete without an attempt to indicate what the Society has already accomplished and what may be the future of its work.

Its first achievement, as already mentioned, was to break the spell of Marxism in England. Public opinion altogether failed to recognise the greatness of Marx during his lifetime, but every year that passes adds strength to the conviction that the broad principles he promulgated will guide the evolution of society during the present century. Marx demonstrated the moral bankruptcy of commercialism and formulated the demand for the communal ownership and organisation of industry; and it is hardly possible to exaggerate the value of this service to humanity. But no man is great enough to be made into a god; no man, however wise, can see far into the future. Neither Marx himself nor his immediate followers recognised the real basis of his future fame; they thought he was a brilliant and original economist, and a profound student of history. His Theory of Value, his Economic Interpretation of History, seemed to them the incontestible premises which necessarily led to his political conclusions. This misapprehension would not have much mattered had they allowed themselves freedom of thought. Socialism, as first preached to the English people by the Social Democrats, was as narrow, as bigoted, as exclusive as the strictest of Scotch religious sects. "Das Kapital," Vol. I, was its bible; and the thoughts and schemes of English Socialists were to be approved or condemned according as they could or could not be justified by a quoted text.

The Fabian Society freed English Socialism from this intellectual bondage, and freed it sooner and more completely than "Revisionists" have succeeded in doing anywhere else.

Accepting the great principle that the reconstruction of society to be worked for is the ownership and control of industry by the community, the Fabians refused to regard as articles of faith either the economic and historic analyses which Marx made use of or the political evolution which he predicted.

Socialism in England remained the fantastic creed of a group of fanatics until "Fabian Essays" and the Lancashire Campaign taught the working classes of England, or at any rate their leaders, that Socialism was a living principle which could be applied to existing social and political conditions without a cataclysm either insurrectionary or even political. Revolutionary phraseology, the language of violence, survived, and still survives, just as in ordinary politics we use the metaphors of warfare and pretend that the peaceful polling booth is a battlefield and that our political opponents are hostile armies. But we only wave the red flag in our songs, and we recognise nowadays that the real battles of Socialism are fought in committee rooms at Westminster and in the council chambers of Town Halls.

It was perhaps fortunate that none of the Fabian leaders came within the influence of the extraordinary personality of Karl Marx. Had he lived a few years longer he might have dominated them as he dominated his German followers, and one or two of his English adherents. Then years would have been wasted in the struggle to escape. It was fortunate also that the Fabian Society has never possessed one single outstanding leader, and has always refrained from electing a president or permanent chairman. There never has been a Fabian orthodoxy, because no one was in a position to assert what the true faith was.

Freedom of thought was without doubt obtained for English Socialists by the Fabians. How far the world-wide revolt against Marxian orthodoxy had its origin in England is another and more difficult question. In his study of the Fabian Society[43] M. Édouard Pfeiffer states in the preface that the Society makes this claim, quotes Bernard Shaw as saying to him, "The world has been thoroughly Fabianised in the last twenty-five years," and adds that he is going to examine the accuracy of it. Later he says:—

"Les premiers de tous les Socialistes, les Fabiens out inauguré le mouvement de critique antimarxiste: à une époque oû les dogmes du maître étaient considérés comme intangibles, les Fabiens out prétendu que l'on pouvait se dire socialiste sans jamais avoir lu le Capital ou en en désapprouvant la teneur; par opposition à Marx ils out ressuscité l'esprit de Stuart Mill et sur tous les points ils se sont attaqués à Marx, guerre des classes et materialisme historique, catastrophisme et avant tout la question de la valeur-travail."[44] [Google translate: " First of all Socialists, the Fabians out inaugurated the Marxist critique of movement at a time when the master's dogmas were regarded as intangible, the Fabians out claimed that one could say whether the Socialist without ever having read or Capital in disapproving of the content; as opposed to Marx out they resurrected the spirit of John Stuart Mill and all the points they have tackled Marx, class warfare and historical materialism, catastrophism and foremost the issue of labor value . " [44]


This is a French view. Germany is naturally the stronghold of Marxism, and the country where it has proved, up to a point, an unqualified success. Although the Social Democratic Party was founded as an alliance between the followers of Marx and of Lassalle, on terms to which Marx himself violently objected, none the less the leadership of the party fell to those who accepted the teaching of Marx, and on that basis by far the greatest Socialist Party of the world has been built up. Nowhere else did the ideas of Marx hold such unquestioned supremacy: nowhere else had they such a body of loyal adherents, such a host of teachers and interpreters. Only on the question of agricultural land in the freer political atmosphere of South Germany was there even a breath of dissent. The revolt came from England in the person of Edward Bernstein, who, exiled by Bismarck, took refuge in London, and was for years intimately acquainted with the Fabian Society and its leaders. Soon after his return to Germany he published in 1899 a volume criticising Marxism,[45] and thence grew up the Revisionist movement for free thought in Socialism which has attracted all the younger men, and before the war had virtually, if not actually, obtained control over the Social Democratic Party.

In England, and in Germany through Bernstein, I think the Fabian Society may claim to have led the revolt. Elsewhere the revolt has come rather in deeds than in words. In France, in Italy, and in Belgium and in other European countries, a Socialist Party has grown up which amid greater political opportunities has had to face the actual problems of modern politics. These could not be solved by quotations from a German philosopher, and liberty has been gained by force of circumstances. Nevertheless in many countries, such as Russia and the United States, even now, or at any rate until very recent years, the freedom of action of Socialist parties has been impeded by excessive respect for the opinions of the Founder, and Socialist thought has been sterilised, because it was assumed that Marx had completed the philosophy of Socialism, and the business of Socialists was not to think for themselves, but merely to work for the realisation of his ideas.

***

But mere freedom was not enough. Something must be put in the place of Marx. His English followers did not notice that he had indicated no method, and devised no political machinery for the transition; or if they noticed it they passed over the omission as a negligible detail. If German Socialism would not suit, English Socialism had to be formulated to take its place. This has been the life-work of the Fabian Society, the working out of the application of the broad principles of Socialism to the industrial and political environment of England. I say England advisedly, because the industrial and political conditions of Scotland are in some degree different, and the application of the principles of Socialism to Ireland has not yet been seriously attempted. But for England "Fabian Essays" and the Fabian Tracts are by general consent the best expositions of the meaning and working of Socialism in the English language.

Marxian Socialism regarded itself as a thing apart. Marx had discovered a panacea for the ills of society: the old was to be cleared away and all things were to become new. In Marx's own thought evolution and revolution were tangled and alternated. The evolutionary side was essential to it; the idea of revolutionary catastrophe is almost an excrescence. But to the Marxians (of whom Marx once observed that he was not one) this excrescence became the whole thing. People were divided into those who advocated the revolution and those who did not. The business of propaganda was to increase the number of adherents of the new at the expense of the supporters of the old.

The Fabians regarded Socialism as a principle already in part embodied in the constitution of society, gradually extending its influence because it harmonised with the needs and desires of men in countries where the large industry prevails.

Fabian Socialism is in fact an interpretation of the spirit of the times. I have pointed out already that the municipalisation of monopolies, a typically Fabian process, had its origin decades before the Society was founded, and all that the Fabian Society did was to explain its social implications and advocate its wider extension. The same is true of the whole Fabian political policy. Socialism in English politics grew up because of the necessity for State intervention in the complex industrial and social organisation of a Great State. Almost before the evil results of Laissez Faire had culminated Robert Owen was pointing the way to factory legislation, popular education, and the communal care of children. The Ten Hours Act of 1847 was described by Marx himself as "the victory of a principle," that is, of "the political economy of the working class."[46] That victory was frequently repeated in the next thirty years, and collective protection of Labour in the form of Factory Acts, Sanitary Acts, Truck Acts, Employers' Liability Acts, and Trade Board Acts became a recognised part of the policy of both political parties.

Fabian teaching has had more direct influence in promoting the administrative protection of Labour. The Fair Wages policy, now everywhere prevalent in State and Municipal employment, was, as has been already described, if not actually invented, at any rate largely popularised by the Society. It was a working-class demand, and it has been everywhere put forward by organised labour, but its success would have been slower had the manual workers been left to fight their own battle.

I have said that the work of the Society was the interpretation of an existing movement, the explanation and justification of tendencies which originated in Society at large, and not in societies, Fabian or other. That work is only less valuable than the formulation of new ideas. None of the Fabians would claim to rank beside the great promulgators of new ideas, such as Owen and Marx. But the interpretation of tendencies is necessary if progress is to be sustained and if it is to be unbroken by casual reaction. In an old country like ours, with vast forces of inertia built up by ages of precedents, by a class system which forms a part of the life of the nation, by a distribution of wealth which even yet scarcely yields to the pressure of graduated taxation, legislation is always in arrear of the needs of the times; the social structure is always old-fashioned and out of date, and reform always tends to be late, and even too late, unless there are agitators with the ability to attract public attention calling on the men in power to take action.

***

But this victory of a principle is not a complete victory of the principles of Socialism. It is a limitation of the power of the capitalist to use his capital as he pleases, and Socialism is much more than a series of social safeguards to the private ownership of capital. Municipal ownership is a further step, but even this will not carry us far because the capital suitable for municipal management on existing lines is but a small fraction of the whole, and because municipal control does not directly affect the amount of capital in the hands of the capitalists who are always expropriated with ample compensation.

We have made some progress along another line. Supertax, death duties, and taxes on unearned increment do a little to diminish the wealth of the few: old age pensions, national insurance, and workmen's compensation do something towards mitigating the poverty of the poor.

But it must be confessed that we have made but little progress along the main road of Socialism. Private ownership of capital and land flourishes almost as vigorously as it did thirty years ago. Its grosser cruelties have been checked, but the thing itself has barely been touched. Time alone will show whether progress is to be along existing lines, whether the power of the owners of capital over the wealth it helps to create and over the lives of the workers whom it enslaves will gradually fade away, as the power of our kings over the Government of our country has faded, the form remaining when the substance has vanished, or whether the community will at last consciously accept the teaching of Socialism, setting itself definitely to put an end to large-scale private capitalism, and undertaking itself the direct control of industry. The intellectual outlook is bright; the principles of Socialism are already accepted by a sensible proportion of the men and women in all classes who take the trouble to think, and if we must admit that but little has yet been done, we may well believe that in the fullness of time our ideas will prevail. The present war is giving the old world a great shake, and an era of precipitated reconstruction may ensue if the opportunity be wisely handled.

***

The influence of the Fabian Society on political thought is already the theme of doctoral theses by graduates, especially in American universities, but it has not yet found much place in weightier compilation. Indeed so far as I know the only serious attempts in this country to describe its character and estimate its proportions is to be found in an admirable little book by Mr. Ernest Barker of New College, Oxford, entitled "Political Thought in England from Herbert Spencer to the Present Day."[47] The author, dealing with the early Fabians, points out that "Mill rather than Marx was their starting point," but he infers from this that "they start along the line suggested by Mill with an attack on rent as the 'unearned increment' of land," a curious inaccuracy since our earliest contribution to the theory of Socialism, Tract No. 7, "Capital and Land," was expressly directed to emphasising the comparative unimportance of Land Nationalisation, and nothing in the later work of the Society has been inconsistent with this attitude. Then Mr. Barker goes on: "Fabianism began after 1884 to supply a new philosophy in place of Benthamite Individualism. Of the new gospel of collectivism a German writer[48] has said Webb was the Bentham and Shaw the Mill.[49] Without assigning rôles we may fairly say there is some resemblance between the influence of Benthamism on legislation after 1830 and the influence of Fabianism on legislation since, at any rate, 1906.[50] In either case we have a small circle of thinkers and investigators in quiet touch with politicians: in either case we have a 'permeation' of general opinion by the ideas of these thinkers and investigators.... It is probable that the historian of the future will emphasise Fabianism in much the same way as the historian of to-day emphasises Benthamism."[51]

Mr. Barker next explains that "Fabianism has its own political creed, if it is a political creed consequential upon an economic doctrine. That economic doctrine advocates the socialisation of rent. But the rents which the Fabians would socialise are not only rents from land. Rent in the sense of unearned increments may be drawn, and is drawn, from other sources. The successful entrepreneur for instance draws a rent of ability from his superior equipment and education. The socialisation of every kind of rent will necessarily arm the State with great funds which it must use.... Shaw can define the two interconnected aims of Fabianism as 'the gradual extension of the franchise and the transfer of rent and interest to the State.'"

As Mr. Barker may not be alone in a slight misinterpretation of Fabian doctrine it may be well to take this opportunity of refuting the error. He says that Fabianism advocates the socialisation of rent, and in confirmation quotes Shaw's words "rent and interest"! That makes all the difference. If the term rent is widened to include all differential unearned incomes, from land, from ability, from opportunity (i.e. special profits), interest includes all non-differential unearned incomes, and thus the State is to be endowed, not with rents alone, but with all unearned incomes.[52] It is true that the Fabians, throwing over Marx's inaccurate term "surplus value," base their Socialism on the Law of Rent, because, as they allege, this law negatives both equality of income and earnings in proportion to labour, so long as private ownership of land prevails. It is also true that they have directed special attention to the unearned incomes of the "idle" landlord and shareholder, because these are the typical feature of the modern system of distribution, which indeed has come to the front since the time of Marx, and because they furnish the answer to those who contend that wealth is at present distributed approximately in accordance with personal capacity or merit, and tacitly assume that "the rich" are all of them great captains of industry who by enterprise and ability have actually created their vast fortunes.[53] Indeed we might say that we do not mind conceding to our opponents all the wealth "created" by superior brains, if they will let us deal with the unearned incomes which are received independent of the possession of any brains, or any services at all!

But although we regard the case of the capitalist employer as relatively negligible, and although we prefer to concentrate our attack on the least defensible side of the capitalist system—and already the State recognises that unearned incomes should pay a larger proportion in income-tax, that property which passes at death, necessarily to those who have not earned it, should contribute a large quota to the public purse, and that unearned increment on land should in part belong to the public—that does not mean that we have any tenderness for the entrepreneur. Him we propose to deal with by the favourite Fabian method of municipalisation and nationalisation. We take over his "enterprise," his gasworks and waterworks, his docks and trams, his railways and mines. We secure for the State the profits of management and the future unearned increment, and we compensate him for his capital with interest-bearing securities. We force him in fact to become the idle recipient of unearned income, and then we turn round and upbraid him and tax him heavily precisely because his income is unearned! If there is any special tenderness in this treatment, I should prefer harshness. To me it seems to resemble the policy of the wolf towards the lamb.[54]

I will proceed with quotations from Mr. Barker, because the view of a historian of thought is weightier than anything I could say.

"But collectivism also demands in the second place expert government. It demands the 'aristocracy of talent' of which Carlyle wrote. The control of a State with powers so vast will obviously need an exceptional and exceptionally large aristocracy. Those opponents of Fabianism who desire something more revolutionary than its political 'meliorism' and 'palliatives' accuse it of alliance with bureaucracy. They urge that it relies on bureaucracy to administer social reforms from above; and they conclude that, since any governing class is anti-democratic, the Fabians who believe in such a class are really anti-democratic. The charge seems, as a matter of fact, difficult to sustain. Fabians from the first felt and urged that the decentralisation of the State was a necessary condition of the realisation of their aim. The municipality and other local units were the natural bodies for administering the new funds and discharging the new duties which the realisation of that aim would create. 'A democratic State,' Shaw wrote, 'cannot become a Social Democratic State unless it has in every centre of population a local governing body as thoroughly democratic in its constitution as the central Parliament.' The House of Commons he felt must develop 'into the central government which will be the organ of federating the municipalities.' Fabianism thus implied no central bureaucracy; what it demanded was partly, indeed, a more efficient and expert central government (and there is plenty of room for that), but primarily an expert local civil service in close touch with and under the control of a really democratic municipal government. It is difficult to say that this is bureaucracy or that it is not desirable. Many men who are not Fabians or Socialists of any kind feel strongly that the breathing of more vigour and interest into local politics, and the creation of a proper local civil service, are the great problems of the future.

"The policy of Fabianism has thus been somewhat as follows. An intellectual circle has sought to permeate all classes, from the top to the bottom, with a common opinion in favour of social control of socially created values. Resolved to permeate all classes, it has not preached class-consciousness; it has worked as much with and through Liberal 'capitalists' as with and through Labour representatives. Resolved gradually to permeate, it has not been revolutionary: it has relied on the slow growth of opinion. Reformist rather than revolutionary, it has explained the impossibility of the sudden 'revolution' of the working classes against capital: it has urged the necessity of a gradual amelioration of social conditions by a gradual assertion of social control over unearned increment.[55] Hence Fabianism has not adopted the somewhat cold attitude of the pure Socialist Party to Trade Unions, but has rather found in their gradual conquest of better wages and better conditions for the workers the line of social advance congenial with its own principles. Again, it has preached that the society which is to exert control must be democratic, if the control is to be, as it must be, self-control: it has taught that such democratic self-control must primarily be exerted in democratic local self-government: it has emphasised the need of reconciling democratic control with expert guidance. While it has never advocated 'direct action' or the avoidance of political activity, while on the contrary, it has advocated the conquest of social reforms on the fields of parliamentary and municipal government, it has not defended the State as it is, but has rather urged the need for a State which is based on democracy tempered by respect for the 'expert.' In this way Socialism of the Fabian type has made representative democracy its creed. It has adopted the sound position that democracy flourishes in that form of state in which people freely produce, thanks to an equality of educational opportunity, and freely choose, thanks to a wide and active suffrage, their own members for their guidance, and, since they have freely produced and chosen them, give them freely and fully the honour of their trust. And thus Socialists like Mr. Sidney Webb and Mr. Ramsay Macdonald have not coquetted with primary democracy, which has always had a magnetic attraction for Socialists. The doctrine that the people itself governs directly through obedient agents—the doctrine of mandate and plebiscite, of referendum and initiative—is not the doctrine of the best English Socialism." Mr. Barker next explains that behind these ideas lies "an organic theory of society," that society is regarded as "an organic unity with a real 'general will' of its own," and after stating that "the development of Liberalism, during the last few years, shows considerable traces of Fabian influence," concludes the subject with the words "Collectivism of the Fabian order was the dominant form of Socialism in England till within the last three of four years." Of the movement of Guild Socialists and others which he deems to have replaced it I shall speak later.

I have ventured to quote from Mr. Barker at some length because his summary of Fabian doctrine seems to me (with the exception noted) to be both correct and excellent, and it is safer to borrow from a writer quite unconnected with the Society an estimate of its place in the history of English political thought, rather than to offer my own necessarily prejudiced opinion of its achievements.

***

But I must revert again to the Fabian "method." "Make Socialists," said Mr. Wells in "Faults of the Fabian," "and you will achieve Socialism. There is no other way"; and Mr. Wells in his enthusiasm anticipated a society of ten thousand Fabians as the result of a year's propaganda. Will Socialism come through the making of Socialists?

If so, Socialism has made but little progress in England, since the number who profess and call themselves Socialist is still insignificant. The foregoing pages have shown in the words of a student of political thought how Socialism has been made in England in quite another way.

We did not at the time repudiate Mr. Wells' dictum: indeed we adopted his policy, and attempted the making of Socialism on a large scale. No doubt there is a certain ambiguity in the word "Socialists." It may mean members of Socialist societies, or at any rate "unattached Socialists," all those in fact who use the name to describe their political opinions. Or it may merely be another way of stating that the existing form of society can only be altered by the wills of living people, and change will only be in the direction of Socialism, when the wills which are effective for the purpose choose that direction in preference to another.

Mr. Wells himself described as a "fantastic idea" the notion that "the world may be manoeuvred into Socialism without knowing it": that "society is to keep like it is ... and yet Socialism will be soaking through it all, changing without a sign,"[56] and he at any rate meant by his phrase, "make members of Socialist societies."

The older and better Fabian doctrine is set out in the opening paragraphs of Tract 70, the "Report on Fabian Policy" (1896).

"THE MISSION OF THE FABIANS

The object of the Fabian Society is to persuade the English people to make their political constitution thoroughly democratic and so to socialise their industries as to make the livelihood of the people entirely independent of private capitalism.

The Fabian Society endeavours to pursue its Socialist and Democratic objects with complete singleness of aim. For example:—

It has no distinctive opinions on the Marriage Question, Religion, Art, abstract Economics, historic Evolution, Currency, or any other subject than its own special business of practical Democracy and Socialism.

It brings all the pressure and persuasion in its power to bear on existing forces, caring nothing by what name any party calls itself or what principles, Socialist or other, it professes, but having regard solely to the tendency of its actions, supporting those which make for Socialism and Democracy and opposing those which are reactionary.

It does not propose that the practical steps towards Social Democracy should be carried out by itself or by any other specially organised society or party.

It does not ask the English people to join the Fabian Society."

In old days acting on this view of our "mission" we deliberately allowed the Society to remain small. Latterly we tried to expand, and in the main our attempt was an expensive failure. The other Socialist bodies have always used their propaganda primarily for recruiting; and they have sought to enlist the rank and file of the British people. In this they too have substantially failed, and the forty or fifty thousand members of the I.L.P. and B.S.P. are roughly no larger a proportion of the working class than the three thousand Fabians are of the middle class. If the advance of Socialism in England is to be measured by the "making of Socialists," if we are to count membership, to enumerate meetings, to sum up subscriptions, the outlook is gloomy. Thirty-four years ago a group of strong men led by Mr. H.M. Hyndman founded the Democratic Federation, which survives as the British Socialist Party, with Mr. Hyndman still to the fore; the rest have more or less dropped out, and no one has arisen to take their places. Twenty-two years ago Keir Hardie founded the Independent Labour Party: he has died since the first draft of this passage was written, and no one is left who commands such universal affection and respect amongst the members of the Society he created. Of the seven Essayists who virtually founded the Fabian Society only one is still fully in harness, and his working life must necessarily be nearing its term. It may be doubted whether a society for the propagation of ideas has the power to long outlive the inspiration of its founder, unless indeed he is a man of such outstanding personality that his followers treat him as a god. The religions of the world have been maintained by worshippers, and even in our own day the followers of Marx have held together partly because they regard his teachings with the uncritical reverence usually accorded to the prophets of new faiths. But Marxism has survived in Germany chiefly because it has created and inspired a political party, and political parties are of a different order from propagandist societies. Socialism in England has not yet created a political party; for the Labour Party, though entirely Socialist in policy, is not so in name or in creed, and in this matter the form counts rather than the fact.

Europe, as I write in the early days of 1916, is in the melting-pot, and it would be foolish to prophesy either the fate of the nations now at war or, in particular, the future of political parties in Great Britain, and especially of the Labour Party.

But so far as concerns the Fabian Society and the two other Socialist Societies, this much may be said: three factors in the past have kept them apart: differences of temperament; differences of policy; differences of leadership. In fact perhaps the last was the strongest.

I do not mean that the founders of the three societies entertained mutual antipathies or personal jealousies to the detriment of the movement. I do mean that each group preferred to go its own way, and saw no sufficient advantage in a common path to compensate for the difficulties of selecting it.

In a former chapter I have explained how a movement for a form of Socialist Unity had at last almost achieved success, when a new factor, the European War, interposed. After the war these negotiations will doubtless be resumed, and the three Socialist Societies will find themselves more closely allied than ever before. The differences of policy which have divided them will then be a matter of past history. The differences of temperament matter less and less as the general policy becomes fixed, and in a few years the old leaders from whose disputes the general policy emerged must all have left the stage. The younger men inherit an established platform and know nothing of the old-time quarrels and distrusts. They will come together more easily. If the organised propaganda of Socialism continues—and that perhaps is not a matter of certainty—it seems to me improbable that it will be carried on for long by three separate societies. In some way or other, in England as in so many other countries, a United Socialist organisation will be constituted.

***

But what of the future of Fabian ideas? In a passage already quoted Mr. Barker indicates that the dominance of "Collectivism of the Fabian order" ceased three or four years ago, and he goes on to indicate that it has been replaced by an anti-state propaganda, taking various forms, Syndicalism, Guild Socialism, and the Distributivism of Mr. Belloc. It is true that Fabianism of the old type is not the last event in the history of political thought, but it is still, I venture to think, the dominant principle in political progress. Guild Socialism, whatever its worth, is a later stage. If our railways are to be managed by the Railwaymen's Union, they must first be acquired for the community by Collectivism.

This is not the place to discuss the possibilities of Guild Socialism. After all it is but a form of Socialism, and a first principle of Fabianism has always been free thought. The leading Guild Socialists resigned from the Society: they were not expelled: they attempted to coerce the rest, but no attempt was made to coerce them. Guild Socialism as a scheme for placing production under the management of the producers seems to me to be on the wrong lines. The consumer as a citizen must necessarily decide what is to be produced for his needs. But I do not belong to the generation which will have to settle the matter. The elderly are incompetent judges of new ideas. Fabian doctrine is not stereotyped: the Society consists in the main of young people. The Essayists and their contemporaries have said their say: it remains for the younger people to accept what they choose, and to add whatever is necessary. Those who repudiated the infallibility of Marx will be the last to claim infallibility for themselves. I can only express the hope that as long as the Fabian Society lasts it will be ever open to new ideas, ever conscious that nothing is final, ever aware that the world is enormously complex, and that no single formula will summarise or circumscribe its infinite variety.[57]

***

The work of the Fabian Society has been not to make Socialists, but to make Socialism. I think it may be said that the dominant opinion in the Society—at any rate it is my opinion—is that great social changes can only come by consent. The Capitalist system cannot be overthrown by a revolution or by a parliamentary majority. Wage slavery will disappear, as serfdom disappeared, not indeed imperceptibly, for the world is now self-conscious, not even so gradually, for the pace of progress is faster than it was in the Middle Ages, but by a change of heart of the community, by a general recognition, already half realised, that whatever makes for the more equitable distribution of wealth is good; that whatever benefits the working class benefits the nation; that the rich exist only on sufferance, and deserve no more than painless extinction; that the capitalist is a servant of the public, and too often over-paid for the services that he renders.

Again, Socialism succeeds because it is common sense. The anarchy of individual production is already an anachronism. The control of the community over itself extends every day. We demand order, method, regularity, design; the accidents of sickness and misfortune, of old age and bereavement, must be prevented if possible, and if not, mitigated. Of this principle the public is already convinced: it is merely a question of working out the details. But order and forethought is wanted for industry as well as for human life. Competition is bad, and in most respects private monopoly is worse. No one now seriously defends the system of rival traders with their crowds of commercial travellers: of rival tradesmen with their innumerable deliveries in each street; and yet no one advocates the capitalist alternative, the great trust, often concealed and insidious, which monopolises oil or tobacco or diamonds, and makes huge profits for a fortunate; few out of the helplessness of the unorganised consumers.

But neither the idle rich class nor the anarchy of competition is so outstanding an evil as the poverty of the poor. We aim at making the rich poorer chiefly in order to make the poor richer. Our first tract, "Why are the Many Poor?" struck the keynote. In a century of abounding wealth England still has in its midst a hideous mass of poverty which is too appalling to think of. That poverty, we say, is preventible. That poverty was the background of our thoughts when the Society was founded. Perhaps we have done a little to mitigate it: we believe we have done something to make clear the way by which it may ultimately be abolished. We do not constantly talk of it. We write of the advantages of Municipal Electricity, of the powers of Parish Councils, of the objections to the Referendum; but all the while it is that great evil which chiefly moves us, and by our success or our failure in helping on the reconstruction of society for the purpose of abolishing poverty, the work of the Fabian Society must ultimately be judged.

_______________

Notes:

[43] "La Société Fabienne et le Mouvement socialiste anglais contemporain." By Édouard Pfeiffer, Paris, F. Giard and E. Brière, 1911; an excellent volume but full of errors.

[44] "The Fabians were the first amongst Socialists to start the movement of anti-Marxist criticism. At a period when the dogmas of the Master were regarded as sacred, the Fabians ventured to assert that it was possible to call oneself a Socialist without ever having read 'Das Kapital,' or without accepting its doctrine. In opposition to Marx, they have revived the spirit of J.S. Mill, and they have attacked Marx all along the line—the class war, the economic interpretation of history, the catastrophic method, and above all the theory of value."

[45] Published in English by the Independent Labour Party in 1909 as "Evolutionary Socialism."

[46] Address to the International, 1862, quoted from Spargo's "Karl Marx," p. 266.

[47] Home University Library, Williams and Norgate, 1915, 1s.

[48] M. Beer, "Geschichte des Socialismus in England" (Stuttgart, 1913), p. 462. Mr. Beer devotes seven pages to the Society, which he describes with accuracy, and interprets much as Mr. Barker has done. The book was written at the request of the German Social Democratic Party.

[49] I quote, but do not endorse the opinion that G.B.S. markedly resembles James Mill (Mr. Barker confuses the two Mills). Beer adds "Webb was the thinker, Shaw the fighter." This antithesis is scarcely happy. The collaboration of the two is much too complicated to be summed up in a phrase.

[50] But see chapter VIII for its influence before 1906; and see Appendix I. A. for a much fuller discussion of this subject.

[51] The same idea is expressed by a Canadian Professor:—

"It is necessary to go back to the Philosophical Radicals to find a small group of men who have exercised such a profound influence over English political thought as the little band of social investigators who organised the Fabian Society."

"Socialism: a critical analysis." By O.D. Skelton, Ph.D., Professor of Economic Science, Kingston, Canada. (Constable, 1911.) p. 288.

[52] Mr. Barker erroneously uses the word "increment" for "income" in several places. Unearned increment is quite another thing.

[53] See "Socialism and Superior Brains: a reply to Mr. Mallock," by G.B. Shaw. Fabian Tract 146.

[54] Mr. Barker emphasises the "discrimination advocated by the Fabians" in favour of profits in a later passage (p. 224) not here quoted.

[55] This should read "incomes."

[56] "Faults of the Fabian," p. 9.

[57] See Appendix I. B.
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Re: THE HISTORY OF THE FABIAN SOCIETY, by Edward R. Pease

Postby admin » Tue Sep 22, 2015 5:26 am

Appendices

Appendix 1: Memoranda by Bernard Shaw


Bernard Shaw has been good enough to write the following memoranda on Chapter XII. For various reasons I prefer to leave that chapter as it stands; but the memoranda have an interest of their own and I therefore print them here.

A: ON THE HISTORY OF FABIAN ECONOMICS

Mr. Barker's guesses greatly underrate the number of tributaries which enlarged the trickle of Socialist thought into a mighty river. They also shew how quickly waves of thought are forgotten. Far from being the economic apostle of Socialism, Mill, in the days when the Fabian Society took the field, was regarded as the standard authority for solving the social problem by a combination of peasant proprietorship with neo-Malthusianism. The Dialectical Society, which was a centre of the most advanced thought in London until the Fabian Society supplanted it, was founded to advocate the principles of Mill's Essay on Liberty, which was much more the Bible of English Individualism than Das Kapital ever was of English Socialism. As late as 1888 Henry Sidgwick, a follower of Mill, rose indignantly at the meeting of the British Association in Bath, to which I had just read the paper on The Transition to Social-Democracy, which was subsequently published; as one of the Fabian Essays, and declared that I had advocated nationalisation of land; that nationalisation of land was a crime; and that he would not take part in a discussion of a criminal proposal. With that he left the platform, all the more impressively as his apparently mild and judicial temperament made the incident so unexpected that his friends who had not actually witnessed it were with difficulty persuaded that it had really happened. It illustrates the entire failure of Mill up to that date to undo the individualistic teaching of the earlier volumes of his Political Economy by the Socialist conclusions to which his work on the treatise led him at the end. Sidney Webb astonished and confounded our Individualist opponents by citing Mill against them; and it is probably due to Webb more than to any other disciple that it is now generally known that Mill died a Socialist. Webb read Mill and mastered Mill as he seemed to have read and mastered everybody else; but the only other prominent Socialist who can be claimed by Mill as a convert was, rather unexpectedly, William Morris, who said that when he read the passage in which Mill, after admitting that the worst evils of Communism are, compared to the evils of our Commercialism, as dust in the balance, nevertheless condemned Communism, he immediately became a Communist, as Mill had clearly given his verdict against the evidence. Except in these instances we heard nothing of Mill in the Fabian Society. Cairnes's denunciation of the idle consumers of rent and interest was frequently quoted; and Marshall's Economics of Industry was put into our book boxes as a textbook; but the taste for abstract economics was no more general in the Fabian Society than elsewhere. I had in my boyhood read some of Mill's detached essays, including those on constitutional government and on the Irish land question, as well as the inevitable one on Liberty; but none of these pointed to Socialism; and my attention was first drawn to political economy as the science of social salvation by Henry George's eloquence, and by his Progress and Poverty, which had an enormous circulation in the early eighties, and beyond all question had more to do with the Socialist revival of that period in England than any other book. Before the Fabian Society existed I pressed George's propaganda of Land Nationalisation on a meeting of the Democratic Federation, but was told to read Karl Marx. I was so complete a novice in economics at that time that when I wrote a letter to Justice pointing out a flaw in Marx's reasoning, I regarded my letter merely as a joke, and fully expected that some more expert Socialist economist would refute me easily. Even when the refutation did not arrive I remained so impressed with the literary power and overwhelming documentation of Marx's indictment of nineteenth-century Commercialism and the capitalist system, that I defended him against all comers in and out of season until Philip Wicksteed, the well-known Dante commentator, then a popular Unitarian minister, brought me to a standstill by a criticism of Marx which I did not understand. This was the first appearance in Socialist controversy of the value theory of Jevons, published in 1871. Professor Edgeworth and Mr. Wicksteed, to whom Jevons appealed as a mathematician, were at that time trying to convince the academic world of the importance of Jevons's theory; but I, not being a mathematician, was not easily accessible to their methods of demonstration. I consented to reply to Mr. Wicksteed on the express condition that the editor of To-day, in which my reply appeared, should find space for a rejoinder by Mr. Wicksteed. My reply, which was not bad for a fake, and contained the germ of the economic argument for equality of income which I put forward twenty-five years later, elicited only a brief rejoinder; but the upshot was that I put myself into Mr. Wicksteed's hands and became a convinced Jevonian, fascinated by the subtlety of Jevons's theory and the exquisiteness with which it adapted itself to all the cases which had driven previous economists, including Marx, to take refuge in clumsy distinctions between use value, exchange value, labour value, supply and demand value, and the rest of the muddlements of that time.

Accordingly, the abstract economics of the Fabian Essays are, as regards value, the economics of Jevons. As regards rent they are the economics of Ricardo, which I, having thrown myself into the study of abstract economics, had learnt from Ricardo's own works and from De Quincey's Logic of Political Economy. I maintained, as I still do, that the older economists, writing before Socialism had arisen as a possible alternative to Commercialism and a menace to its vested interests, were far more candid in their statements and thorough in their reasoning than their successors, and was fond of citing the references in De Quincey and Austin's Lectures on Jurisprudence to the country gentleman system and the evils of capitalism, as instances of frankness upon which no modern professor dare venture.

The economical and moral identity of capital and interest with land and rent was popularly demonstrated by Olivier in Tract 7 on Capital and Land, and put into strict academic form by Sidney Webb. The point was of importance at a time when the distinction was still so strongly maintained that the Fabian Society was compelled to exclude Land Nationalizers, both before and after their development into Single Taxers, because they held that though land and rent should be socialized, capital and interest must remain private property.

This really exhausts the history of the Fabian Society as far as abstract economic theory is concerned. Activity in that department was confined to Webb and myself. Later on, Pease's interest in banking and currency led him to contribute some criticism of the schemes of the currency cranks who infest all advanced movements, flourishing the paper money of the Guernsey Market, and to give the Society some positive guidance as to the rapid integration of modern banking. But this was an essay in applied economics. It may be impossible to draw a line between the old abstract deductive economics and the modern historical concrete economics; but the fact remains that though the water may be the same, the tide has turned. A comparison of my exposition of the law of rent in my first Fabian Essay and in my Impossibilities of Anarchism with the Webbs' great Histories of Trade Unionism and of Industrial Democracy will illustrate the difference between the two schools.

The departure was made by Graham Wallas, who, abandoning the deductive construction of intellectual theorems, made an exhaustive study of the Chartist movement. It is greatly to be regretted that these lectures were not effectively published. Their delivery wrought a tremendous disillusion as to the novelty of our ideas and methods of propaganda; much new gospel suddenly appeared to us as stale failure; and we recognized that there had been weak men before Agamemnon, even as far back as in Cromwell's army. The necessity for mastering the history of our own movement and falling into our ordered place in it became apparent; and it was in this new frame of mind that the monumental series of works by the Webbs came into existence. Wallas's Life of Francis Place shows his power of reconstructing a popular agitation with a realism which leaves the conventional imaginary version of it punctured and flaccid; and it was by doing the same for the Chartist movement that he left his mark on us.

Of the other Essayists, Olivier had wrestled with the huge Positive Philosophy of Comte, who thus comes in as a Fabian influence. William Clarke was a disciple of Mazzini, and found Emerson, Thoreau, and the Brook Farm enthusiasts congenial to him. Bland, who at last became a professed Catholic, was something of a Coleridgian transcendentalist, though he treated a copy of Bakunin's God and the State to a handsome binding. Mrs. Besant's spiritual history has been written by herself. Wallas brought to bear a wide scholastic culture of the classic type, in which modern writers, though interesting, were not fundamental. The general effect, it will be perceived, is very much wider and more various than that suggested by Mr. Ernest Barker's remark that Mill was our starting point.

It is a curious fact that of the three great propagandist amateurs of political economy, Henry George, Marx, and Ruskin, Ruskin alone seems to have had no effect on the Fabians. Here and there in the Socialist movement workmen turned up who had read Fors Clavigera or Unto This Last; and some of the more well-to-do no doubt had read the first chapter of Munera Pulveris. But Ruskin's name was hardly mentioned in the Fabian Society. My explanation is that, barring Olivier, the Fabians were inveterate Philistines. My efforts to induce them to publish Richard Wagner's Art and Revolution, and, later on, Oscar Wilde's The Soul of Man under Socialism, or even to do justice to Morris's News From Nowhere, fell so flat that I doubt whether my colleagues were even conscious of them. Our best excuse must be that as a matter of practical experience English political societies do good work and present a dignified appearance whilst they attend seriously to their proper political business; but, to put it bluntly, they make themselves ridiculous and attract undesirables when they affect art and philosophy. The Arts and Crafts exhibitions, the Anti-Scrape (Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings), and the Art Workers' Guild, under Morris and Crane, kept up a very intimate connection between Art and Socialism; but the maintenance of Fabian friendly relations with them was left mostly to me and Stewart Headlam. The rest kept aloof and consoled themselves with the reflection—if they thought about it at all—that the Utilitarians, though even more Philistine than the Fabians, were astonishingly effective for their numbers.

It must be added that though the tradition that Socialism excludes the established creeds was overthrown by the Fabians, and the claim of the Christian Socialists to rank with the best of us was insisted on faithfully by them, the Fabian leaders did not break the tradition in their own practice. The contention of the Anti-Socialist Union that all Socialists are atheists is no doubt ridiculous in the face of the fact that the intellectual opposition to Socialism has been led exclusively by avowed atheists like Charles Bradlaugh or agnostics like Herbert Spencer, whilst Communism claims Jesus as an exponent; still, if the question be raised as to whether any of the Fabian Essayists attended an established place of worship regularly, the reply must be in the negative. Indeed, they were generally preaching themselves on Sundays. To describe them as irreligious in view of their work would be silly; but until Hubert Bland towards the end of his life took refuge in the Catholic Church, and Mrs. Besant devoted herself to Theosophy, no leading Fabian found a refuge for his soul in the temples of any established denomination. I may go further and admit that the first problems the Fabians had to solve were so completely on the materialist plane that the atmosphere inevitably became uncongenial to those whose capacity was wasted and whose sympathies were starved on that plane. Even psychical research, with which Pease and Podmore varied their Fabian activities, tended fatally towards the exposure of alleged psychical phenomena as physical tricks. The work that came to our hands in our first two decades was materialistic work; and it was not until the turn of the century brought us the Suffrage movement and the Wells raid, that the materialistic atmosphere gave way, and the Society began to retain recruits of a kind that it always lost in the earlier years as it lost Mrs. Besant and (virtually) William Clarke. It is certainly perceptibly less hard-headed than it was in its first period.

B: ON GUILD SOCIALISM

Here I venture to say, with some confidence, that Mr. Barker is mistaken. That storm has burst on the Fabian Society and has left it just where it was. Guild Socialism, championed by the ablest and most industrious insurgents of the rising generation in the Society, raised its issue with Collectivism only to discover, when the matter, after a long agitation, was finally thrashed out at a conference at Barrow House, that the issue was an imaginary one, and that Collectivism lost nothing by the fullest tenable concessions to the Guild Socialists. A very brief consideration will shew that this was inevitable.

Guild Socialism, in spite of its engaging medieval name, means nothing more picturesque than a claim that under Socialism each industry shall be controlled by its own operators, as the professions are to-day. This by itself would not imply Socialism at all: it would be merely a revival of the medieval guild, or a fresh attempt at the now exploded self-governing workshop of the primitive co-operators. Guild Socialism, with the emphasis on the Socialism, implies that the industries, however completely they may be controlled by their separate staffs, must pool their products. All the Guild Socialists admit this. The Socialist State must therefore include an organ for receiving and distributing the pooled products; and such an organ, representing the citizen not as producer but as consumer, reintroduces the whole machinery of Collectivism. Thus the alleged antithesis between Guild Socialism and Collectivism, under cover of which the one was presented as an alternative to the other, vanished at the first touch of the skilled criticism the Fabians brought to bear on it; and now Mrs. Sidney Webb, who was singled out for attack by the Guild Socialists as the arch Collectivist, is herself conducting an investigation into the existing control of industry by professional organizations, whilst the quondam Guild Socialists are struggling with the difficult question of the proper spheres of the old form of Trade Union now called the craft union, and the new form called the industrial union, in which workers of all crafts and occupations, from clerks and railway porters to locomotive drivers and fitters, are organized in a single union of the entire industry. There is work enough for many years to some of the old Fabian kind in these directions; and this work will irresistibly reunite the disputants instead of perpetuating a quarrel in which, like most of the quarrels which the Society has survived, there was nothing fundamental at issue.

There is work, too, to be done in the old abstract deductive department. It can be seen, throughout the history of the Society, how any attempt to discard the old economic basis of the law of rent immediately produced a recrudescence of Anarchism in one form or another, the latest being Syndicalism and that form of Guild Socialism which was all Guild and no Socialism. But there is still much to be settled by the deductive method. The fundamental question of the proportions in which the national income, when socialized, shall be distributed, was not grappled with until 1914, when I, lecturing on behalf of the Society, delivered my final conclusion that equal distribution is the only solution that will realize the ideals of Socialism, and that it is in fact the economic goal of Socialism. This is not fully accepted as yet in the movement, in which there is still a strong leaven of the old craving for an easy-going system which, beginning with "the socialization of the means of production, distribution, and exchange," will then work out automatically without interference with the citizen's private affairs.

Another subject which has hardly yet been touched, and which also must begin with deductive treatment, is what may be called the democratization of democracy, and its extension from a mere negative and very uncertain check on tyranny to a positive organizing force. No experienced Fabian believes that society can be reconstructed (or rather constructed; for the difficulty is that society is as yet only half rescued from chaos) by men of the type produced by popular election under existing circumstances, or indeed under any circumstances likely to be achieved before the reconstruction. The fact that a hawker cannot ply his trade without a licence whilst a man may sit in Parliament without any relevant qualifications is a typical and significant anomaly which will certainly not be removed by allowing everybody to be a hawker at will. Sooner or later, unless democracy is to be discarded in a reaction of disgust such as killed it in ancient Athens, democracy itself will demand that only such men should be presented to its choice as have proved themselves qualified for more serious and disinterested work than "stoking up" election meetings to momentary and foolish excitement. Without qualified rulers a Socialist State is impossible; and it must not be forgotten (though the reminder is as old as Plato) that the qualified men may be very reluctant men instead of very ambitious ones.

Here, then, are two very large jobs already in sight to occupy future Fabians. Whether they will call themselves Fabians and begin by joining the Fabian Society is a question which will not be settled by the generation to which I belong.

G.B.S.

Appendix 2: The Basis of the Fabian Society

The Fabian Society consists of Socialists.

It therefore aims at the reorganisation 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 conveniently 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 worker being now dependent on that class for leave to earn a living.

If these measures be carried out, without compensation (though not without such relief to expropriated individuals as may seem fit to the community), Rent and Interest will be added to the reward of labour, the idle class now living on the labour of others will necessarily disappear, and practical equality of opportunity will be maintained by the spontaneous action of economic forces with much less interference with personal liberty than the present system entails.

For the attainment of these ends the Fabian Society looks to the spread of Socialist opinions, and the social and political changes consequent thereon, including the establishment of equal citizenship for men and women.[58] It seeks to achieve these ends by the general dissemination of knowledge as to the relation between the individual and Society in its economic, ethical, and political aspects.

_______________

Notes:

[58] The words in italics were added in 1907. See page 177.

Appendix 3: List of the names and the years of office of the ninety-six members of the Executive Committee, 1884-1915

The full term of office is from April to March, and such an entry as 1901-2 usually means one year's office. Membership has been terminated in many cases by resignation, in the great majority by refusal to stand for re-election, in perhaps a dozen cases by defeat, and never by death.

Alden, Percy, M.P., 1903-7.
Allen, Clifford, 1912 to date.
Anderson, R. Wherry, 1898-1903.
Atkinson, Miss Mabel, 1909 to date.
Ball, Sidney, 1907-8.
Banner, Robert, 1892.
Barker, Granville, 1907-12.
Bentham, Dr. Ethel, 1909-14.
Bentinck, Mrs. R. Cavendish, 1911-13.
Besant, Mrs. Annie, 1886-90.
Bland, Hubert, 1884-1911. Honorary Treasurer 1884-1911.
Blatch, Mrs. Stanton, 1894-5.
Bray, Reginald A., 1911-12.
Brooke, Miss Emma, 1893-6.
Cameron, Miss Mary, 1893-4.
Campbell, Rev. R.J., 1908-9.
Charrington, Charles, 1899-1904.
Chesterton, Cecil E., 1904-7.
Clarke, William, 1888-91.
Cole, G.D.H., 1914-15.
Davies, Emil, 1911 to date.
Dearmer, Rev. Percy, 1895-8.
Dell, Robert E., 1890-3; 1898-9.
De Mattos, W.S., 1890-4.
Dodd, F. Lawson, 1900 to date. Honorary Treasurer 1911 to date.
Ensor, R.C.K., 1907-11; 1912 to date.
Ervine, St. John G., 1913 to date.
Fairfield, Dr. Letitia, 1915 to date.
Galton, F.W., 1901-7.
Garnett, Mrs. Constance, 1894-5.
Gillespie, H.J., 1914.
Green, J.F. 1899-1900.
Griffith, N.L., 1892-3.
Grover, Miss Mary, 1890-2.
Guest, L. Haden, 1907-11.
Hammill, Fred, 1892-5.
Harben, Henry D., 1911 to date.
Harris, Mrs. O'Brien (Miss Mary O'Brien), 1898-1901.
Headlam, Rev. Stewart D., 1890-1; 1901-11.
Hoatson, Miss Alice, 1890-2. Assistant Hon. Secretary 1885-6.
Hobson, Samuel G., 1900-9.
Holding, H. Bond, 1894-6.
Hutchins, Miss B.L., 1907-12.
Keddell, Frederick, 1884-5. Honorary Secretary 1884-5.
Lawrence F.W. Pethick, 1907-8.
Lawrence, Miss Susan (L.C.C.), 1912 to date.
Lloyd, C.M., 1912-15.
Lowerison, Harry (Bellerby), 1891-2.
Macdonald, J. Ramsay (M.P.), 1894-1900.
Macpherson, Mrs. Fenton, 1900-1.
Macrosty, Henry W., 1895-1907.
Mallet, Mrs. L.T., 1890-2.
Mann, Tom, 1896.
Martin, John W., 1894-9.
Massingham, H.W., 1891-3.
Matthews, John E. (L.C.C.), 1901-2.
Maude, Aylmer, 1907-12.
Money, (Sir) Leo Chiozza (M.P.), 1908-11.
Morley, Professor Edith, 1914 to date.
Morris, Miss May, 1896-8.
Morten, Miss Honor, 1895-8.
Muggeridge, H.T., 1903-5.
Murby, Miss M.B., 1907-13.
Oakeshott, Joseph F., 1890-1902.
Olivier (Sir), Sydney (K.C.M.G.), 1887-1899. Honorary Secretary 1886-9.
Pease, Edward R., 1885-6; 1890 to date. Honorary Secretary 1886, and 1914 to date. Secretary 1890-1913.
Phillips, Dr. Marion, 1913-14.
Phillips, W.L., 1887-8.
Podmore, Frank, 1884; 1886-8.
Priestley, Miss (Mrs. Bart Kennedy), 1896-8. Assistant Secretary, 1892-5.
Reeves, Mrs. Pember, 1907 to date.
Sanders, W. Stephen, 1904 to date. Organising Secretary 1907-13. General Secretary 1914 to date.
Sandham, Mrs., 1891-3.
Sharp, Clifford D., 1909-14.
Shaw, G. Bernard, 1885-1911.
Shaw, Mrs. Bernard (Miss Payne Townshend), 1898-1915.
Slesser, Henry H., 1910-14.
Smith, Miss Ellen, 1915 to date.
Snell, Harry, 1912 to date.
Snowden, Mrs. Philip, 1908-9.
Sparling, H. Halliday, 1892-4.
Squire, J.C., 1914 to date.
Standring, George, 1893-1908; 1909-11.
Taylor, G.R.S., 1905-8.
Townshend, Mrs. Emily C., 1915.
Utley, W.H., 1892-4.
Wallas, Graham, 1888-1895.
Webb, Sidney, 1886 to date.
Webb, Mrs. Sidney, 1912 to date.
Wells, H.G., 1907-8.
Wells, Mrs. H.G., 1908-10.
West, Julius, 1915 to date. Secretary of Research Department, etc., 1908-12.
Whelen, Frederick, 1896-1901; 1902-4.
Williams, Ernest E., 1893-4.
Wilson, Mrs. C.M., 1885-7; 1911-15.
Wood, Mrs. Esther, 1902-3.

Appendix 4: Complete List of Fabian Publications, 1884-1915, with names of authors

FABIAN TRACTS

The printing of the author's name in italics signifies that the tract was adopted and probably amended by the Society and that it was issued without the author's name. In the other cases the author's name is given in the tract, and as a rule the tract was approved for publication as a whole: a star to the author's name signifies "not a member of the Society."

No.

1884.

1. Why are the Many Poor? 4 pp. W.L. Phillips.
2. A Manifesto. 4 pp. G. Bernard Shaw.

1885.

3. To Provident Landlords and Capitalists: A Suggestion and a Warning. 4 pp. G. Bernard Shaw.

1886.

4. What Socialism Is. 12 pp. Mrs. C.M. Wilson and others.

1887.

5. Facts for Socialists. 16 pp. Sidney Webb.
6. The True Radical Programme (Fabian Parliamentary League). 12 pp. G. Bernard Shaw.

1888.

7. Capital and Land. 16 pp. (Sir) Sydney Olivier.

1889.

8. Facts for Londoners. 56 pp. Sidney Webb.
9. An Eight Hours Bill. 16 pp. Do.
10. Figures for Londoners. 4 pp. Do.

1890.

11. The Workers' Political Programme. 20 pp. Sidney Webb.
12. Practical Land Nationalisation. 4 pp. Do.
13. What Socialism Is. 4 pp. Bernard Shaw.
14. The New Reform Bill. 20 pp. J.F. Oakeshott and others.
15. English Progress towards Social Democracy. 16 pp. Sidney Webb.
16. A Plea for an Eight Hours Bill. 4 pp. Sidney Webb.
17. Reform of the Poor Law. 20 pp. Sidney Webb.
18. Facts for Bristol. 20 pp. (Sir) Hartmann W. Just.
19. What the Farm Labourer Wants. 4 pp. Sidney Webb.
20. Questions for Poor Law Guardians. 4 pp. S.W. Group.
21. Questions for London Vestrymen. 4 pp. C. Foulger.
22. The Truth about Leasehold Enfranchisement. 4 pp. Sidney Webb.

1891.

23. The Case for an Eight Hours Bill. 16 pp. Sidney Webb.
24. Questions for Parliamentary Candidates. 4 pp. Do.
25. Questions for School Board Candidates. 4 pp. Do.
26. Questions for London County Councillors. 4 pp. Do.
27. Questions for Town Councillors. 4 pp. Rev. C. Peach.
28. Questions for County Council Candidates (Rural). 4 pp. F. Hudson.
29. What to Read. 48 pp. Graham Wallas (1st edition). (Fifth edition, 1910, not included in the series.)
30. The Unearned Increment. 4 pp. Sidney Webb.
31. London's Heritage in the City Guilds. 4 pp. Sidney Webb.
32. The Municipalisation of the Gas Supply. 4 pp. Do.
33. Municipal Tramways. 4 pp. Do.
34. London's Water Tribute. 4 pp. Do.
35. The Municipalisation of the London Docks. 4 pp. Do.
36. The Scandal of London's Markets. 4 pp. Do.
37. A Labour Policy for Public Authorities. 4 pp. Do.
38. Welsh Translation of No. 1.

1892.

39. A Democratic Budget. 16 pp. J.F. Oakeshott.
40. Fabian Election Manifesto. 16 pp. Bernard Shaw.
41. The Fabian Society: What it has done and how it has done it. 32 pp. G. Bernard Shaw.
42. Christian Socialism. 16 pp. Rev. Stewart D. Headlam.
43. Vote! Vote! Vote! 2 pp. Bernard Shaw.

1893.

44. A Plea for Poor Law Reform. 4 pp. Frederick Whelen.
45. Impossibilities of Anarchism. 28 pp. G. Bernard Shaw.
46. Socialism and Sailors. 16 pp. B.T. Hall.
47. The Unemployed. (Rt. Hon.) John Burns.
48. Eight Hours by Law. Henry W. Macrosty.

1894.

49. A Plan of Campaign for Labour. 28 pp. G. Bernard Shaw.
50. Sweating: Its Cause and Remedy. 16 pp. H.W. Macrosty.
51. Socialism: True and False. 20 pp. Sidney Webb.
52. State Education at Home and Abroad. 16 pp. J.W. Martin.
53. The Parish Councils Act: What it is and how to work it. 20 pp. (Rt. Hon.) Herbert Samuel.*
54. Humanising of the Poor Law. 24 pp. J.F. Oakeshott.
55. The Workers' School Board Programme. 20 pp. J.W. Martin.
56. Questions for Parish Council Candidates. 4 pp. (Rt. Hon.) Herbert Samuel.*
57. Questions for Rural District Council Candidates. 4 pp. (Rt. Hon.) Herbert Samuel*
58. Allotments and How to Get Them. 4 pp. (Rt. Hon.) Herbert Samuel.*
59. Questions for Candidates for Urban District Councils. 4 pp.
60. The London Vestries: What they are and what they do. 20 pp. Sidney Webb.

1895.

61. The London County Council: What it is and what it does. 16 pp. J.F. Oakeshott.
62. Parish and District Councils: What they are and what they can do. 16 pp. (No. 53 re-written.)
63. Parish Council Cottages and how to get them. 4 pp. Edw. R. Pease.
64. How to Lose and how to Win an Election. 2 pp. Ramsay Macdonald.
65. Trade Unionists and Politics. 2 pp. F.W. Galton.
66. A Program for Workers. 2 pp. Edw. R. Pease.

1896.

67. Women and the Factory Acts. 16 pp. Mrs. Sidney Webb.
68. The Tenant's Sanitary Catechism. 4 pp. Arthur Hickmott.
69. The Difficulties of Individualism. 20 pp. Sidney Webb.
70. Report on Fabian Policy. 16 pp. Bernard Shaw.
71. The (London) Tenant's Sanitary Catechism. 4 pp. Miss Grove.
72. The Moral Aspects of Socialism. 24 pp. Sidney Ball.
73. The Case for State Pensions in Old Age. 16 pp. George Turner.
74. The State and Its Functions in New Zealand. 16 pp. The Hon. W.P. Reeves.*

1896.

75. Labour in the Longest Reign. 20 pp. Sidney Webb.
76. Houses for the People. 20 pp. Arthur Hickmott.
77. The Municipalisation of Tramways. 16 pp. F.T.H. Henlé.
78. Socialism and the Teaching of Christ. 16 pp. Rev. John Clifford, D.D.
79. A Word of Remembrance and Caution to the Rich. 16 pp. John Woolman.*
80. Shop Life and its Reform. 16 pp. William Johnson.
81. Municipal Water. 4 pp. C.M. Knowles.*
82. The Workmen's Compensation Act. 20 pp. C.R. Allen, junr.
83. State Arbitration and the Living Wage. 16 pp. H.W. Macrosty.
84. The Economics of Direct Employment. 16 pp. Sidney Webb.
85. Liquor Licensing at Home and Abroad. 16 pp. Edw. R. Pease.
86. Municipal Drink Traffic. 20 pp. Edw. R. Pease.

1899.

87. A Welsh Translation of No. 78. 16 pp.J.F. Oakeshott.
88. The Growth of Monopoly in English Industry. 16 pp. Henry W. Macrosty.
89. Old Age Pensions at Work. 4 pp. Bullock.
90. The Municipalisation of the Milk Supply. 4 pp. Dr. G.F. McCleary.
91. Municipal Pawnshops. 4 pp. Charles Charrington.
92. Municipal Slaughterhouses. 4 pp. George Standring.

1900.

93. Women as Councillors. 4 pp. Bernard Shaw.
94. Municipal Bakeries. 4 pp. Dr. G.F. McCleary.
95. Municipal Hospitals. 4 pp. Do.
96. Municipal Fire Insurance. 4 pp. (1901). Mrs. Fenton Macpherson.
97. Municipal Steamboats. 4 pp. (1901). S.D. Shallard.
98. State Railways for Ireland. 16 pp. Clement Edwards (M.P.).
99. Local Government in Ireland. C.R. Allen, junr.
100. Metropolitan Borough Councils: Their Powers and Duties. 20 pp. Henry W. Macrosty.
101. The House Famine and How to Relieve it. 52 pp. Various.
102. Questions for Candidates: Metropolitan Borough Councils. 4 pp.
103. Overcrowding in London and its Remedy. 16 pp. W.C. Steadman, M.P.
104. How Trade Unions Benefit Workmen. 4 pp. Edw. R. Pease.

1901.

105. Five Years' Fruit of the Parish Councils Act. 24 pp Sidney Webb.
106. The Education Muddle and the Way Out. 20 pp. Sidney Webb.
107. Socialism for Millionaires. 16 pp. Bernard Shaw.
108. Twentieth Century Politics: A Policy of National Efficiency. 16 pp. Sidney Webb.

1902.

109. Cottage Plans and Common Sense. 16 pp. Raymond Unwin.
110. Problems of Indian Poverty. 16 pp. S.S. Thorburn.*
111. Reform of Reformatories and Industrial Schools. 16 pp. H.T. Holmes.
112. Life in the Laundry. 16 pp. Dr. G.F. McCleary.

1903.

113. Communism. 16 pp. William Morris.* Preface by Bernard Shaw.
114. The Education Act, 1902. How to make the best of it. 20 pp. Sidney Webb.
115. State Aid to Agriculture. 16 pp. T.S. Dymond.*

1904.

116. Fabianism and the Fiscal Question: An Alternative Policy. 28 pp. Bernard Shaw.
117. The London Education Act, 1903: How to make the best of it. 20 pp. Sidney Webb.
118. The Secret of Rural Depopulation. 20 pp. Lieut.-Col. D.C. Pedder.*

1904.

119. Public Control of Electric Power and Transit. 16 pp. S.G. Hobson.
120. After Bread, Education. 16 pp. Hubert Bland.
121. Public Service versus Private Expenditure. 12 pp. Sir Oliver Lodge.*
122. Municipal Milk and Public Health. 20 pp. F. Lawson. Dodd.
123. The Revival of Agriculture: A National Policy for Great Britain. 24 pp. Henry W. Macrosty.
124. State Control of Trusts. 16 pp. Henry W. Macrosty.
125. Municipalisation by Provinces. 16 pp. W. Stephen Sanders.

1906.

126. The Abolition of Poor Law Guardians. 24 pp. Edw. R. Pease.
127. Socialism and Labour Policy. 16 pp. Hubert Bland (Editor).
128. The Case for a Legal Minimum Wage. 20 pp. W. Stephen Sanders.
129. More Books to Read. 20 pp. Edw. R. Pease.

1907.

130. Home Work and Sweating: The Causes and Remedies. 20 pp. Miss B.L. Hutchins.
131. The Decline in the Birth-rate. 20 pp. Sidney Webb.
132. A Guide to Books for Socialists. 12 pp. "The Nursery."
133. Socialism and Christianity. 24 pp. Rev. Percy Dearmer, D.D.
134. Small Holdings, Allotments, and Common Pastures. 4 pp. Revised edition of No. 58.
135. Paupers and Old Age Pensions. 16 pp. Sidney Webb.
136. The Village and the Landlord. 12 pp. Edward Carpenter.

1908.

137. Parish Councils and Village Life. 28pp. Revised version of No. 105.
138. Municipal Trading. 20 pp. Aylmer Maude.
139. Socialism and the Churches. 16 pp. Rev. John Clifford, D.D.
140. Child Labour Under Capitalism. 20 pp. Mrs. Hylton Dale.

1909.

141. (Welsh Translation of No. 139).
142. Rent and Value. 12 pp. Adapted by Mrs. Bernard Shaw from Fabian Essays, The Economic Basis.
143. Sosialaeth Yng Ngoleuni'R Beibl (Welsh). J.R. Jones.
144. Machinery: Its Masters and its Servants. 20 pp. H.H. Schloesser (Slesser) and Clement Game.
145. The Case for School Nurseries. 20 pp. Mrs. Townshend.
146. Socialism and Superior Brains. A Reply to Mr. Mallock. 24 pp. Bernard Shaw.
147. Capital and Compensation. 16 pp. Edward R. Pease.
148. What a Health Committee can do. 16 pp. Miss B.L. Hutchins.

1910.

149. The Endowment of Motherhood. 24 pp. Henry D. Harben.
150. State Purchase of Railways: A Practicable Scheme. 24 pp. Emil Davies.
151. The Point of Honour. A Correspondence on Aristocracy and Socialism. 16 pp. Mrs. Ruth Cavendish Bentinck.

1911.

152. Our Taxes as they are and as they ought to be. 20 pp. Robert Jones.
153. The Twentieth Century Reform Bill. 20 pp. Henry H. Schloesser (Slesser).
154. The Case for School Clinics. 16 pp. L. Haden Guest.
155. The Case against the Referendum. 20 pp. Clifford D. Sharp.
156. What an Education Committee can do (Elementary Schools). 36 pp. The Education Group.
157. The Working Life of Women. 16 pp. Miss B.L. Hutchins.
158. The Case Against the Charity Organisation Society. 20 pp. Mrs. Townshend.
159. The Necessary Basis of Society. 12 pp. Sidney Webb.
160. A National Medical Service. 20 pp. F. Lawson Dodd.

1912.

161. Afforestation and Unemployment. 16 pp. Arthur P. Grenfell.
162. Family Life on a Pound a Week. 24 pp. Mrs. Pember Reeves.
163. Women and Prisons. 28 pp. Helen Blagg and Charlotte Wilson.
164. Gold and State Banking. A Study in the Economics of Monopoly. 20 pp. Edward R. Pease.
165. Francis Place: The Tailor of Charing Cross. 28 pp. St. John G. Ervine.
166. Robert Owen: Social Reformer. 24 pp. Miss B.L. Hutchins.
167. William Morris and the Communist Ideal. 24 pp. Mrs. Townshend.

1913.

168. John Stuart Mill. 24 pp. Julius West.
169. The Socialist Movement in Germany. 28 pp. W. Stephen Sanders.
170. Profit-Sharing and Co-partnership: A fraud and a failure? 16 pp. Edward R. Pease.
171. The Nationalisation of Mines and Minerals Bill. 16 pp. Henry H. Schloesser (Slesser).
172. What about the Rates, or Municipal Finance and Municipal Autonomy. 12 pp. Sidney Webb.
173. Public versus Private Electricity Supply. 20 pp. C. Ashmore Baker.*

1914.

174. Charles Kingsley and Christian Socialism. 28 pp. Colwyn E. Vulliamy.
175. The Economic Foundations of the Women's Movement. 24 pp. M.A. (Mabel Atkinson).
176. War and the Workers. Handbook of some immediate measures to prevent Unemployment and relieve distress. 24 pp. Sidney Webb.

1915.

177. Socialism and the Arts of Use. 16 pp. A. Clutton Brock.
178. The War; Women; and Unemployment. 28 pp. The Women's Group Executive.

BOOKS AND SPECIAL PAMPHLETS.

Those without any publisher's name were published by the Society.

The Government Organisation of Unemployed Labour. Report made by a Committee to the Fabian Society and ordered to be printed for the information of members. 1886. pp. 24. N.P. Sidney Webb and Frank Podmore.

Fabian Essays in Socialism. Edited by Bernard Shaw. 1889. 1st edition, 6s. Subsequent editions published by Walter Scott.

Report on Municipal Tramways, presented to the Richmond (Surrey) Town Council by Aid. Thompson.* Reprinted for the Society by special permission. 4to. pp. 20. 1898. 6d.

Labour in the Longest Reign: 1837-1897. By Sidney Webb. A reprint of Tract No. 75. Grant Richards, pp. 62. 1897. 1s.

Fabianism and the Empire. A Manifesto by the Fabian Society. Edited by Bernard Shaw. pp. 101. Grant Richards. 1900. 1s.

Fabianism and the Fiscal Question: An Alternative Policy. Special edition of Tract 116; with a preface by Bernard Shaw. pp. 39. 1904. 1s.

This Misery of Boots. By H.G. Wells. Cover designed by A.G. Watts, pp. 48. 1907. 3d.

Tract Index and Catalogue Raisonné of Tracts Nos. 1 to 139. Pp. 35. 1908. 3d.

Those Wretched Rates, a dialogue. By F.W. Hayes, pp. 16. 1908. 1d.

Ballads and Lyrics of Socialism, 1883-1908. By E. Nesbit (Mrs. Hubert Bland), pp. 80. A.C. Fifield. 1908. 6d. and 1s.

Break Up the Poor Law and Abolish the Workhouse. Being Part I of the Minority Report of the Poor Law Commission 1909. pp. 601. 2s. By Sidney and Beatrice Webb.

The Remedy for Unemployment. Being Part II. 1909. pp. 345. 1s. By Sidney and Beatrice Webb.

A Summary of Six Papers and Discussions upon the Disabilities of Women as Workers.

The writers of the papers: Miss Emma Brooke, Dr. Constance Long,* Mrs. Ernestine Mills, Mrs. Gallichan (G. Gasquoine Hartley), Miss Millicent Murby, Dr. Ethel Bentham.

Issued for private circulation only by the Fabian Women's Group, pp. 24. 1909.

Summary of Eight Papers and Discussions upon the Disabilities of Mothers as Workers.

The writers of the papers: Mrs. Pember Reeves, Dr. Ethel Vaughan Sawyer,* Mrs. Spence Weiss,* Mrs. Bartrick Baker, Mrs. Stanbury, Mrs. S.K. Ratcliffe, Miss B.L. Hutchins, Mrs. O'Brien Harris.

Issued for private circulation only by the Fabian Women's Group, pp. 32. 1910.


What to Read on

Social and Economic Subjects. 5th edition. Earlier editions published as Tract No. 29. pp. 52. P.S. King and Son. 1910. 1s.
Songs for Socialists, compiled by the Fabian Society. A.C. Fifield. 1912. 3d.


The Rural Problem. By Henry D. Harben. pp. 169. Constable and Co. 1913. 2s. 6d. net.

Women Workers in Seven Professions. A survey of their economic conditions and prospects. Edited for the Studies Committee of the Fabian Women's Group. By Edith J. Morley. pp. xxii+318. G. Routledge and Sons. 1914. 6s.

Wage-Earning Women and their Dependents. By Ellen Smith on behalf of the Executive Committee of the Women's Group, pp. 36. 1915. 1s. net.

BOUND TRACTS.

The whole of the numbered tracts at any time in print are sold as a bound volume with a title-page. As the complete set is in demand and as every few months a new tract is published, or an old one is sold out, the sets are usually bound a dozen at a time, and each dozen differs as a rule from all the rest. Price now 5s. net.

FABIAN SOCIALIST SERIES.

Published for the Society by A.C. Fifield at 6d. and is net each.

I. Socialism and Religion. Reprint of Tracts, Nos. 42, 78, 133, and 79. pp. 87. 1908.

II. Socialism and Agriculture. Reprint of Tracts, Nos. 136, 118, 115, and 123. pp. 94. 1908.

III. Socialism and Individualism. Reprint of Tracts, Nos. 69, 45, 72, and 121. pp. 102. 1908.

IV. The Basis and Policy of Socialism. Reprint of Tracts, Nos. 5, 7, 51, and 108. pp. 95. 1908.

V. The Common Sense of Municipal Trading. By Bernard Shaw. Reprint with a new preface, pp. 120. 1908.

VI. Socialism and National Minimum. Papers by Mrs. Sidney Webb and Miss B.L. Hutchins, and reprint of Tract No. 128. pp. 91. 1909.

VII. Wastage of Child Life, as exemplified by Conditions in Lancashire. By J. Johnston, M.D.* A reprint, pp. 95. 1909.

VIII. Socialism and Superior Brains. Reprint of Tract, No. 146. pp. 59. 1910.

IX. The Theory and Practice of Trade Unionism. By J.H. Greenwood. Preface by Sidney Webb. pp. 70. 1911.


RESEARCH DEPARTMENT PUBLICATIONS.

New Statesman Supplements:

Industrial Organisation in Germany, Report. By W.S. Sanders. 1913. 8 pp. folio.

National Insurance Act. First Draft Report of the Insurance Committee. March 14, 1914. 32 pp. folio, 1s.

Co-operative Production and Profit-Sharing. February 14, 1914. 32 pp. folio. 2s. 6d.

Co-operative Movement. Drafts of the first two parts of the Report on the Control of Industry. By Mr. and Mrs. Sidney Webb. May 30, 1914. 36 pp. folio, 1s.

Industrial Insurance. March 13, 1915. 32 pp. folio, 1s.

State and Municipal Enterprise. Draft Report. By Mr. and Mrs. Sidney Webb. May 8, 1915. 32 pp. folio, 1s.

Suggestions for the Prevention of War.

Part I. By L.S. Woolf. July 10, 1915. 24 pp. folio, 1s.

Part II. By the International Agreements Committee July 17, 1915. 8 pp. folio, 1s.

English Teachers and their Professional Organisation. Monograph by Mrs. Sidney Webb.

Part I. September 25, 1915. 24 pp. folio. 6d.

Part II. October 2, 1915. 24 pp. folio. 6d.


Labour Year Book, 1915-16, issued under the auspices of the Parliamentary Committee of the Trade Union Congress, the Executive Committee of the Labour Party, and the Fabian Research Department. 1915. 704 pp. 1s., and 2s. 6d.
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Re: THE HISTORY OF THE FABIAN SOCIETY, by Edward R. Pease

Postby admin » Tue Sep 22, 2015 5:26 am

Index: Of the principal references to people and subjects

A
Agriculture,
15,47,157,228
Alden, Percy,
153,172,231
Allen, Clifford,
195,225,234
Anarchism,
49,53,66
Arts Group, The,
188

B
Balfour, Rt. Hon. Arthur J.,
45,142
Ball, Sidney,
103,180,183
Barker, Ernest,
244,258
Barker, Granville,
180,186
Barnett, Canon,
16
Basis, The Fabian,
71,169,177,178,231,269
Bax, Belfort,
66
Beale, Mr.,
112
Bentham, Jeremy,
244
Bernstein, Edward,
239
Besant, Mrs. Annie, joins,
47;
her position,
64;
Fabian Essay,
92;
resigns,
98;
lecture,
187
Birth-rate,
160
Bland, Hubert,
31,35,222,223,265
Book-boxes,
121
Brooke, Miss Emma,
190
Brooke, Rupert,
234
Brooke, Rev. Stopford,
69
Burns, Rt. Hon. John,
67,83,110,217
Butler, Samuel,
105

C
Campbell, Rev. R.J.,
187
Carpenter, Edward,
36
Champion, H.H.,
25,31,69,75
Charrington, Charles,
131,133
Christian Socialism,
25,83
Chubb, Percival,
29,69
Clarke, William,
31,33;
joins,
47;
position,
64,123
Clifford, Dr. John,
129
Cole, G.D.H.,
230
Comte, Auguste,
14,18,263
Conference, of 1886,
55;
of 1892,
106;
of later years,
197
Conscription,
137
Co-operation,
44,92,114,228
Cox, Harold,
46
Crane, Walter,
66,71,75,88,129,131,133,264
Crooks, Rt. Hon. Will,
129,152,155

D
Darwin, Charles,
15
Davidson, Thomas,
26,28
Decline of birth-rate,
160
De Mattos, W.S.,
93,105,123
Democratic Federation,
24,38,49
Dock Strike,
75,83,114
Dodd, F. Lawson,
129,131,172,202
Drink Trade, Municipal,
159

E
Edgeworth, Professor,
260
Education,
142
Education Group,
185
Eight Hours Bill,
84,203
Elections, of 1892,
108,112;
of 1906,
152;
of 1910,
220
Ellis, Havelock, 29,36
Ensor, R.C.K.,
180,221
Evolution,
15,17

F
"Facts for Londoners,"
80
"Facts for Socialists,"
69
"Fair Wages,"
109,114,241
"Family, The,"
15,69,175,181
Feeding school children,
148,203
Fellowship of the New Life
28,32,35
Finance, 1884,
35;
1886,
60;
1891,
99;
1893,
100;
1908,
185

G
George, Henry,
16,19,25,28,38,45,260
"Government Organisation of Unemployed Labour,"
57
Green, J. Frederick,
131,133
Groups, Fabian,
104,195
Guild Socialism,
230,254

H
Haldane, Lord,
74,111
Hampstead Historic, The,
65
Harben, Henry D.,
222,224,227,228
Hardie, J. Keir,
113,167,253
Headlam, Rev. Stewart D.,
25,57,75,94,142,166,168,172
Henderson, Rt. Hon. Arthur,
152,155
Hobson, S.G.,
130,150,172
Housing,
140
Huddersfield Election,
155
Hutchinson, Henry H.,
95,123
Hutchinson, Miss,
123
Huxley, T.H.,
18
Hyndman, H.M.,
24,38,51,202,252

I
Ibsen,
94
Imperialism,
135
Independent Labour Party,
63,97,101,129,202
Industrial Remuneration Conference,
44
"Intercepted Letter, An,"
118
International Socialist Congress,
126,209

J
Jevons, Stanley,
260
Joint Standing Committee,
202

K
"Kapital, Das,"
24,64,236,258
Keddell, Frederick,
31,52
Kropotkin, Prince,
49,66

L
Labour Party, The,
97,116,148,167,171
Lancashire Campaign,
95
Land,
47,244,260
Land taxation,
21,25,73
Lavelaye, Emile de,
16,19
Leasehold Enfranchisement,
94,110,113
Lecturing,
77,105,108,124
Library,
120
Local Fabian Societies,
99,102,191
Local Government Information Bureau,
206
London County Council,
79,92,109
London School Board,
109
London School of Economics,
123

M
Macdonald, J. Ramsay,
35,125,127,129,133,249
Macrosty, Henry S.,
131,157,172
Martin, J.W.,
158
Marx, Karl,
23,45,61,89,236,260
Massingham, H.W., 109,116,117
Maude, Aylmer,
180
Middle Class Socialist Party,
153,172,178,180
Mill, John Stuart,
18,21,216,244,259
Minority Report of the Poor Law Commission,
215
Money, Sir Leo Chiozza,
169,224
Morris, Miss May,
88
Morris, William,
23,57,66,90,183,204,259,264
Motto, Fabian,
39,165
Municipalisation,
81,159,242,247

N
National Committee for the Prevention of Destitution,
219
National Insurance,
223
Newcastle Program,
112
Nursery, The Fabian,
189

O
Oakeshott, J.F.,
36,131,158
Old Age Pensions,
159,223
Olivier, Sir Sydney,
25;
joins,
46;
secretary,
65;
"Capital and Land,"
73;
Governor of Jamaica,
128;
Wells' Committee,
166;
opinions,
263,264
Owen, Miss Dale,
30,31
Owen, Robert,
23,241

P
Pankhurst, Mrs.,
57,133
Parish Councils,
121,141
Parliamentary League, Fabian,
68,73
Pease, Edward R.,
29,59,80,93,149,159,232
Phillips, W.L.,
39,73
Podmore, Frank,
28,39,48,53,57,73,80
Poor Law,
14,46,213
Portsmouth Election,
155
Positivism,
14,18

R
Reeves, Mrs. Pember,
166,177,180
Reform Committee, Fabian,
255
Research Department,
227
Ritchie, Professor D.G.,
75,116
Ruskin, John,
27,263

S
Salt, Henry S.,
36,131,133
Sanders, W. Stephen,
125,155,156,172,191,232
School Boards,
142
Shaw, G. Bernard,
25,
joins,
40;
first tract,
40;
on Burglars,
45;
Fabian Essays,
87;
"Quintessence of Ibsenism,"
94;
on Newcastle Program,
112;
on Fabian policy,
126;
Vestryman,
127;
"Fabianism and the Empire,"
134;
Tariff Reform,
159;
versus Wells,
173;
retires from Executive,
223;
on Economics,
258;
on Guild Socialism,
265
Shaw, Mrs. Bernard,
123,166,172,187,190
Sidgwick, Henry,
258
Slesser, Henry H.,
208,222,225
Small holdings,
47,228
Smith, Samuel,
15,24
Snell, Harry,
155
Social Democratic Federation,
49,61,89,106,203
Socialist League,
66,89
South African War,
128
"Spectator," The,
14
Spencer, Herbert,
18
Standring, George,
74,172
Stepniak, Sergius,
94
Summer School,
199
Syndicalism,
229,254

T
Tariff Reform, 159
Taunton Election,
154
Tchaykovsky, Nicholas,
66
Tillett, Ben,
113
Tobacco, State cultivation of,
59
"Tory Gold,"
50,63
Trade Unionism,
44,91,112,114,228
Turner, George,
159

U
Unemployment,
52,57,69,215
Unity, Socialist,
202,253
University Fabian Societies,
103,191,193
University Socialist Federation,
195

W
Wallas, Graham, joins,
47;
lectures,
65;
London School Board,
127;
resigns,
156;
ideas,
262
War of 1914, The
233,234
Webb, Sidney, joins,
46;
Executive,
52;
"Facts for Socialists,"
69;
""Facts for Londoners,"
83;
elected to L.C.C.,
109;
Education Acts,
142;
co-operation with Mrs. Webb,
212;
on Mill,
259
Webb, Mrs. Sidney,
114,177,187,Chapter XI
Wells, H.G.,
39,153,Chapter IX,250
Wicksteed, Philip,
260
Williams, E.E.,
205
Wilson, Mrs. C.M.,
48;
Tract 4,
54;
Women's Group,
189;
Executive,
222
Woolwich Election,
155
Women's Group, The,
189
Women's Suffrage,
175,204
Workmen's Compensation,
122
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Re: THE HISTORY OF THE FABIAN SOCIETY, by Edward R. Pease

Postby admin » Tue Sep 22, 2015 5:28 am

Image
MRS. ANNE BESANT, IN 1890
From a photograph By Savony of New York

Image
HUBERT BLAND, IN 1902
From a photograph by G.C. Beresford, S.W.

Image
WILLIAM CLARKE, ABOUT 1895
From a photograph by Van der Weyde

Image
SYDNEY OLIVIER, IN 1903
From a photograph by Elliott and Fry, W.

Image
G. BERNARD SHAW, IN 1889
From a photograph by Emery Walker

Image
GRAHAM WALLAS, IN 1891

Image
SIDNEY WEBB, IN 1909
From a drawing by Jessie Holliday

Image
EDWARD R. PEASE, IN 1913

Image
FRANK PODMORE, ABOUT 1895
From a photograph by Fredk. Hollyer, W.

Image
MRS. SIDNEY WEBB, IN 1909

Image
H.G. WELLS, IN 1908
At the door of his house at Sandgate
From a photograph by Lambert Weston and Son, Folkestone
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