Fabian Essays in Socialism

by Unknown

THE FABIAN SOCIETY.

BY WILLIAM CLARKE, M.A.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

As to the general programme of work in which the members are supposed more or less to take part, I may quote from the printed advice given to members as to what they can do. First of all, “the need of study” is insisted on. It is assumed that the member will read all the society’s publications; and his next duty, it is urged, should be to read the criticisms on the other side, after the manner of Cicero, who was always careful to get up his opponent’s case. If a member cannot read or study alone, he is recommended to set on foot a local reading circle, and apply to the secretary for literature for the circle. No public work should be done until this self-education has been accomplished, and the member is really able to speak with authority and to deal effectively with an opponent. The opponents of Socialism in England are usually persons sent out by a body called the Liberty and Property Defence League, of which the American millionnaire, Mr. Astor, now a London Tory newspaper proprietor, is a member. These persons have, as a rule, a remarkable capacity for making fools of themselves; nevertheless, it is always a tactical blunder to underestimate the ability of your opponent, and Fabian lecturers are advised to assume that these Liberty and Property defenders are acquainted with economics, even though there is good reason to suspect they are not. There is nothing that kills like ridicule; to gibbet an ignorant and presumptuous debater, and make him look like a fool before a large audience, is a source of pleasure to every rightly constituted mind. Members of the society are also urged to correspond with their Parliamentary or municipal representative on all vital points, to worry his life out of him if he is obstinate or wrong-headed or dishonest, and to make him yearn like the poet for a lodge in some vast wilderness where he might never receive another letter or vote of censure as long as he lived. This is a good way to combat what Walt Whitman calls “the never-ending audacity of elected persons.” The member should always attend the local caucus meeting, and do what he can there; and if he has the time to spare, he should be a candidate for any public post, such as member of Parliament, of county or municipal council, of school board, guardian of the poor, or member of the parish council yet to be constituted. The great difficulty in the way of this is that these public persons are not paid in England, and few of the busy and impecunious members of the Fabian Society can afford the time for these things.

Having thus described the constitution, work, and general character of the Fabian Society, let me speak on the general intellectual forces which have been operating in England to bring about this new political growth among active young men; for it is quite new. My first acquaintance with anything that could properly be called Socialism in England was in London in 1879, when I went one evening to hear a young Jewish gentleman, since deceased, Mr. Montefiore, read a paper on German Socialism, before the London Dialectical Society. Mr. Montefiore had but a slender knowledge of his subject, and we had to wait for speeches by a German friend of Marx, resident in London, and from a young, dreamy-looking man with long, thick, tousled hair, whom I learned was Mr. Ernest Belfort Bax, since better known as a prolific writer on Socialism from the revolutionary, Marxite point of view. At that time there was not a single young man in London interested in or in favor of anything like Socialism, excepting Mr. Bax. Now there are hundreds. What are the reasons for the change?

(1) The exhaustion of the older Liberalism and the obviously unsatisfactory character of mere republicanism. And here American readers must permit me to be plain by saying that the United States seemed to furnish an object lesson to the world as to the failure of mere republicanism to solve a single one of our social questions. A quarter of a century ago the American Republic was the guiding star of advanced English political thought. It is not so now: candor compels me to say that. It is not merely a question of machine politics, of political corruption, of the omnipotent party boss; though supine Americans who do nothing to overthrow those purely political evils should be reminded that Europe as well as America is involved in and has to pay for their cowardice and indifference. But over and beyond this is the great fact of the division between rich and poor, millionnaires at one end, tramps at the other, a growth of monopolies unparalleled, crises producing abject poverty just as in Europe. These facts proved to men clearly that new institutions were of no use along with the old forms of property; that a mere theoretic democracy, unaccompanied by any social changes, was a delusion and a snare. The result of this is that the old enthusiasm for mere republicanism has died away, and that, though twenty-five years ago there was a good sprinkling of republican clubs in England, there is not a single one of them left now.

(2) The second cause I take to be a new spirit in literature. The genteel, the conventional, the thinner kind of romantic literature began to die out; and the powerful realistic school began to attract men’s minds. There was a desire to know things as they are, to sound the plummet in the sea of social misery, to have done with make-believe and get at realities. The Russian writers, with their intense Socialistic feeling, attracted great numbers of readers, who seemed to find in them something entirely new and immensely powerful. I should name among individual writers who have powerfully aided the growth, I do not say of Socialism itself, but of the feeling in the soil of which Socialism is easily developed, Dickens, Victor Hugo, Carlyle, Whitman, Ruskin, Tolstoi, Zola and Arnold. A curious and medley list, you may say, and so it is; but I am certain that each of these great writers has contributed a distinct element to the expansion and liberation of the minds that have been formed, say, during the last twenty years. For among all these writers, varied as they are, it is the social feeling which is the most powerful impulse.

(3) Along with the new literature has grown a new art feeling, an intense hatred of the smug and respectable, and a love to be surrounded by attractive objects. Ruskin, Morris, and Walter Crane have shown why it is that the true artist is at war with commercialism, with the notion that things are to be produced for a profit, no matter what abominations you may turn out. The conception that no person has any right to inflict an ugly object of any sort on the world, especially for the sake of making gain out of it, has taken hold on the imaginative mind of the younger people of our cultivated classes.

(4) In the fourth place, the old political economy is absolutely dead in England, although you might not perhaps guess it from some of the English economic writers. The influence of German thought in this, as in other departments, has affected men’s minds. Take a series of books like the Social Science Series, published by Sonnenschein; half those books are Socialistic,—and that would have been an impossibility twenty years ago. Of the “Fabian Essays in Socialism,” it may be said that the publisher, as well as the Society, reaped large profits from it. I mention such works as these, rather than romances like Morris’s “News from Nowhere,” or Bellamy’s “Looking Backward.” The charm of Morris’s style and the ingenuity of Bellamy’s narrative would be sufficient to account for their success; but the popularity of these other works represents a body of serious interest in advanced economics, which may well be considered startling when the old hidebound prejudices of orthodox English economics are taken into consideration.

(5) Laissez-faire individualist political philosophy is dead. In vain does poor Mr. Herbert Spencer endeavor to stem the torrent. His political ideas are already as antiquated as Noah’s ark. I do not know a single one of the younger men in England who is influenced by them in the slightest degree, though one hears of one occasionally, just as one hears of a freak in a dime museum. For all practical purposes, philosophic Radicalism, as it was called, is as extinct as the dodo.

(6) There is another cause which cannot be ignored, though I speak upon it with some hesitation, as I purposely avoid, as far as possible, the difficult questions of religion and the deeper ethics. I mean that the old dualism, with its creed of other-worldliness, has gone by the board. Whatever men’s theoretical views are upon many transcendental matters, there is a general feeling now that the world is one, and that actual life here is just as sacred, normal, good, as it ever was or ever will be in any hypothetical past or future; that if there is any heaven for us we have to make it, and that such heaven is a state of the mind, of human relationships, and not a place to be reached at a definite period of time. Perhaps I may quote the eloquent words of William Morris in his “Dream of John Ball”: “Fellowship is heaven, and the lack of fellowship is hell.” This idea is, I say, a powerful factor in leading the minds of the younger men to the views of which I am speaking. But men are not altogether influenced by their theoretical or even spiritual ideas; they are also moved, and so long as they have material bodies to be fed and clothed they will continue to be moved, by purely self-regarding and economic considerations. Let us never be deluded into supposing that altruistic feelings alone will induce men to make great social changes; egotistic considerations will prompt them as well, the desire of self-preservation working along with the desire for a better and more harmonious social order than exists. It is not only upon the working classes that capitalist monopoly tells; it tells also upon the educated middle classes who are not in the monopoly. They find the avenues of livelihood and preferment one after another closed to them; and just as education spreads, this will become more and more the case. When a small number of persons in a large community are highly educated, they have what economists call a monopoly value; they can get a good price for their services, because they possess something which few people have. Spread this higher education and the monopoly is broken down. Now, this is roughly what is going on in society; democracy is levelling all up to a common level, however gradual may be the process; and consequently highly educated men with their special gifts find their rates of remuneration becoming lower and lower, unless they possess some rare gift of genius, as a Sara Bernhardt in acting, a Paderewski in playing, a Stevenson in story-telling, a Mascagni as a composer. These rare people still command their monopoly value; but for the rest it has disappeared. Thus even more than the workingmen, perhaps, it has been the educated young men of the middle class (and the young women, too) who have been hardest hit by the modern development. Fifty years ago you could have gathered all the press writers of London into a single moderate-sized room. To-day all told they number nearly ten thousand. Everybody with a pen, ink and paper and any capacity for turning out “copy” is a journalist; and you see at once that it is impossible for all these men to earn a living. They don’t, and can’t. There are scores of highly educated people who work every day in the British Museum for eight or nine hours a day and earn less than a mechanic in constant occupation. It is the same in all the professions. Only fifteen per cent of London advocates ever get briefs at all; the other eighty-five per cent get nothing. In the medical profession it is the same. The prizes go to about five per cent of the profession; as for the average medical man in the London suburbs, the rates are so cut that I am credibly informed by one of them who studied at Cambridge and Heidelberg, and on whose education hundreds of pounds were spent, the fee for attendance and prescription in his suburban district has been brought down to twenty-five cents. It will be seen that it is not a question of making money or of the disgusting progress towards smug respectability, which is known as “getting on,”—it is positively a question of a bare living. Now, while a workingman who has never known comfort, whose father has never known it before him, can often stand a frightful amount of poverty without getting desperate, the well-bred young man cannot; and the result is that the keenest and most dangerous discontent comes from the educated classes, who are leading the Socialist masses all over Europe. Some superficial people think the remedy is to be found in inducing young men of the better classes to abandon the so-called “respectable” occupations and go in for manual labor. Let them cease, by all means, to be “respectable,” but let not any one lay the flattering unction to his soul that this, under existing economic conditions, is any solution. For what is the difficulty about manual labor now? Why, that thousands of those already engaged in it are not wanted; it is the difficulty of the unemployed, the difficulty of over-production. In 1886, according to the Report of the Washington Bureau of Statistics, there were at least one and one-half million of unemployed men in the United States; and this state of things has been almost if not quite paralleled in 1893. In London lack of employment is chronic, and is growing to such huge proportions that our cowardly, blind, public men dare not grapple with it. In Australia the unemployed have been walking the streets of Melbourne by the thousand. How absurd then it is to propose to add to the numbers of workingmen when those already in the ranks cannot find means of living! There is one method, alas, open to men, as there is always one method open to tempted, poverty-stricken women,—the method of what I may call intellectual prostitution; and many there be that go in at that gate. Sick and weary of the penury and struggle that go with honesty, young men of ability will deliberately sell themselves to the capitalist who has cornered our intellectual as he has cornered our material production, and will serve him for a good living. What numbers I have known choose this path!—and I cannot blame them, for they are forced into it by the conditions of modern life. It is useless preaching fine morals to them; the conditions of life must be adapted to human nature as it is, for human nature will not, you may be quite sure, suddenly transform itself to suit the conditions. These, then, are the economic motives which, combined with the moral and intellectual motives to which I have previously given expression, are forcing young men of education and good breeding into the ranks of the Socialists, and which especially operate in the case of a body like the Fabian Society.

Readers will be asking by this time whether I am not going to set forth the actual political programme or “platform,” as it is called in America, of the Fabian Society. Yes, that is just what I am going to do. As the Fabian Society holds that social transformation must be gradual, unless there is to be a general smash-up, it proposes a series of reforms for effecting the gradual change of society into a really social democratic state. But these reforms, it will be understood, are adopted with a distinct end in view, which fact makes all the difference between people of principle and mere opportunists who have no end in view other than the personal end of lining their own pockets. The following, then, are the planks of the Fabian political platform: Adult suffrage, Parliamentary and municipal, one vote for each man and each woman of twenty-one and upwards who are not in prison or in a lunatic asylum. The second ballot, as in France, Germany and Switzerland, so that whoever is elected will have an absolute majority of the votes polled. Payment of members by the state and of election expenses by the district (it must be remembered that at present representatives are not paid in England). Taxation of unearned incomes by such means as a land tax, heavy death duties to go to municipalities, and a progressive income tax. Municipalization of land and local industries, so that free and honorable municipal employment may be substituted for private charity, which, to vary a well-known line of Shakespeare, is twice cursed,—it curseth him who gives and him who takes. All education to be at the public cost for all classes, including manual as well as book training. Nationalization of all canals and railways, so that the public highways may belong to the public, as they always did until the new era of steam, when they got into the hands of capitalists. It is as ridiculous to pay Mr. Vanderbilt if you happen to want to go from New York to Chicago as it would be to pay him if you desired to take a walk down Fifth Avenue. The eight hours day for wage-workers in all government and municipal offices, in all monopolies like coal mines and railways, and in all industries where the workers want it. Parish councils for the laborers, with compulsory power to acquire land to build dwellings, to administer schools and charities, and to engage in co-operative farming.

Such is the programme through the adoption of which the Fabian Society believes that the country once called “merry England,” but the greater portion of which is now dreary and sordid and cursed with poverty, might again be really happy and be converted into a land of real and not of sham freedom. And now a word, in conclusion, on an important point,—the relation of the intellectual proletariat, as it has been called, to the masses, of the educated young men to the bulk of the working classes. Most of the members of the Fabian Society are educated, middle-class people, though there are workingmen connected with it also. What is to be the relation of these educated middle-class people to the swarming multitudes of workers? This is a vital social question, the most vital we have immediately before us. One remembers what Matthew Arnold said in America,—that the salvation of modern society lay in the hands of a remnant. I should be inclined to put it rather differently, and to say that, if the social evolution is to be peaceful and rational, it must be effected by the union of a cultivated remnant with the masses of the toiling people. American optimism may chafe at the little word “if.” Can there be any doubt, you may ask, that we shall go on prosperously and peacefully? I reply, yes, there is quite good enough ground for doubting this. As Mr. Pearson, the author of that remarkable book on “National Life and Character,” which has impressed us in England very deeply, has said, ancient civilization in the times of the Antonines seemed as firm and strong as does ours, nay, stronger, for it had, in the main, lasted as many centuries as ours has lasted decades.

Stout was its arm, each nerve and bone
Seemed puissant and alive.

Had you predicted then to a Roman senator that the splendid Greco-Roman cities would be given to the flames, and that the Roman Senate and legions would be trampled down by ignorant hordes of barbarians, he would have smiled, offered you another cup of Falernian wine, and changed the subject. Yet we know this happened; and I confess I can see nothing in our mushroom civilization which we have any particular right to regard as inherently more enduring than the elaborate and stately organism of Roman jurisprudence. But there are no barbarians! Yes, there are; but they are not outside us,—they are in our midst. Do you suppose that the grim victim of crushing poverty in a London attic or a Berlin cellar cares one pin’s head for all the heritage of the world’s thought which appeals to the highly educated? How are these huge masses of poor people to be welded into a great phalanx, to be induced to subordinate their passions to the demands of reason, to look not merely at the needs of the moment, but at those of next year, to realize that the world cannot be remade in a day, but yet that it can be so reconstituted as to give all opportunities to live as human beings should? Silly people are always talking nonsense about the danger of “agitators.” I know all about agitators. I know nearly every prominent agitator in Great Britain; and I can say confidently that it is the agitators who have to hold back, to restrain the people from rash and even mad action. The record of every English strike would show that this was the case. If all the labor leaders and agitators were silenced, it would be the very worst thing that could befall the capitalist class. The masses are at present, at the very best, an army of privates without officers. This is not their fault; it is their misfortune. They have not had the training, the culture, which enables them to meet rich men and their agents on equal ground. An English statesman, whose name is known the world over, said privately to me not long ago: “The labor men here in the House of Commons are all good fellows, but they are no use as leaders; the principal men of either party can twist them round their fingers with the greatest ease. If the labor movement is to be a success, it must be led by educated men.” I believe that verdict of one of the ablest and best-informed public men now living to be true. To what does it point? To the union of culture with labor, to reform this badly-jointed system. Only, be it observed, it must be union on equal terms. There must be no lofty condescension on the part of culture any more than base truckling on the part of labor. It must be an equal copartnership, where each partner recognizes that the other has something which he needs. And let me say, as one who knows workmen, that, in a certain and very real way, culture has as much to learn from labor as labor from culture. Let the cultured man approach the laboring man on perfectly equal terms, in a cordial and open way; and let both unite to deliver a groaning world from the bondage of riches. English experience shows that this can be done; and this idea is to a very great degree the idée mère of the Fabian Society, whose members have no higher ambition than to mingle freely with the workmen and share in the common life. By this means the hatred and suspicion felt by the French and German workmen towards any one who wears a black coat is eliminated, and both labor and culture gain in breadth, knowledge and sympathy, and the cause of rational progress is rendered more secure. Walt Whitman has told us, in “Leaves of Grass,” how he went “freely with powerful, uneducated persons,”—a gospel which Mr. John Addington Symonds, in his essay on Whitman, tells us, saved him from being a prig. And this gospel of free intercourse with the so-called “common people,” who are neither saints nor great sinners, but real men, more real than the conventional middle-class man can ever afford to be, is the healthiest, best advice which I can give to cultivated men.