“By far our most important work at this period was our renewal of that historic and economic equipment of Social-Democracy of which Ferdinand Lassalle boasted, and which has been getting rustier and more obsolete ever since his time and that of his contemporary, Karl Marx.... In 1885 we used to prate about Marx's theory of value and Lassalle's Iron Law of Wages as if it were still 1870. In spite of Henry George, no Socialist seemed to have any working knowledge of the theory of economic rent: its application to skilled labour was so unheard of that the expression 'rent of ability' was received with laughter when the Fabians first introduced it into their lectures and discussions; and as for the modern theory of value, it was scouted as a blasphemy against Marx.... As to history, we had a convenient stock of imposing generalizations about the evolution from slavery to serfdom and from serfdom to free wage labour. We drew our pictures of society with one broad line dividing the bourgeoisie from the proletariat, and declared that there were only two classes really in the country. We gave lightning sketches of the development of the mediæval craftsman into the manufacturer and finally into the factory hand. We denounced Malthusianism quite as crudely as the Malthusians advocated it, which is saying a great deal; and we raged against emigration, national insurance, co-operation, trade-unionism, old-fashioned Radicalism, and everything else that was not Socialism; and that, too, without knowing at all clearly what we meant by Socialism. The mischief was, not that our generalizations were unsound, but that we had no detailed knowledge of the content of them: we had borrowed them ready-made as articles of faith; and when opponents like Charles Bradlaugh asked us for details we sneered at the demand without being in the least able to comply with it. The real reason why Anarchist and Socialist worked then shoulder to shoulder as comrades and brothers was that neither one nor the other had any definite idea of what he wanted, or how it was to be got. All this is true to this day of the raw recruits of the movement, and of some older hands who may be absolved on the ground of invincible ignorance; but it is no longer true of the leaders of the movement in general. In 1887 even the British Association burst out laughing as one man when an elderly representative of Philosophic Radicalism, with the air of one who was uttering the safest of platitudes, accused us of ignorance of political economy; and now not even a Philosophical Radical is to be found to make himself ridiculous in this way. The exemplary eye-opening of Mr. Leonard Courtney by Mr. Sidney Webb lately in the leading English economic review surprised nobody, except perhaps Mr. Courtney himself. The cotton lords of the north would never dream to-day of engaging an economist to confute us with learned pamphlets as their predecessors engaged Nassau Senior in the days of the Ten Hours' Bill, because they know that we should be only too glad to advertise our Eight Hours' Bill by flattening out any such champion. From 1887 to 1889 we were the recognized bullies and swashbucklers of advanced economics.”[84]
Not without reason have the Fabians been called the Jesuits of the Socialist evangel in England. The “waiting” of the Fabian motto is synonymous, not with inaction, but with unflagging energy.[85] The Fabians eschewed pleasures and recreations of every kind in favour of public speaking and public instruction; their policy has always been one of education and permeation. In the year ending April, 1889, to take a single example, the number of lectures delivered by members of the Fabian Society alone was upwards of seven hundred. In addition to writing or editing many publications of the Fabian Society, Shaw has delivered, in the last twenty-odd years, considerably more than a thousand public lectures and addresses. Until the close of 1889, the Fabians had confined their propagandist campaign to three directions: publication of manifestos and pamphlets; delivery of public addresses and holding of conferences, and exciting efforts towards the permeation of the Liberal party. In December, 1889, the Fabian Society published the well-known book, Fabian Essays in Socialism, edited by Shaw, and containing, in addition to two essays of his own, essays by Sidney Olivier, William Clarke, Hubert Bland, Sidney Webb, Annie Besant and Graham Wallas.[86] The authors, constituting the Executive Council of the Fabian Society, made no claim to be more than communicative learners: the book was the outcome of their realization of the lack of anything like authoritative, and at the same time popular, presentations of the political, economic, and moral aspects of contemporary Socialism.
Facsimile of Cover Design of Fabian Essays (1890).
In general, it may be said that the Fabians, while strenuously avowing themselves strict evolutionists, are in reality highly revolutionary. The boast of the Fabian Society is freedom from the illusions and millennial aspirations of the great mass of Socialists. It is a society of irreverence and scientific iconoclasm, bowing to the fetishism neither of George nor of Marx. Towards Marx and Lassalle, some of whose views must now be discarded as erroneous or obsolete, the Fabian Society insists on the necessity of maintaining as critical an attitude as these eminent Socialists themselves maintained towards their predecessors St. Simon and Robert Owen. In origin anarchistic and revolutionary as could be desired, in spirit the Fabians remain anarchistic and revolutionary. In principle avowedly orderly and constitutional, in policy frankly opportunist, in practice strictly scientific and economic, the Fabians may be called the realists of the Socialist movement. They have ruthlessly snatched the masks from the faces of the Utopian dreamers and romancers.[87] While the rank and file of the “S. D. F.” have been the very good friends of the Fabians, the radical differences in their respective policies have precluded all possibility of amalgamation. As succinctly stated by Shaw: “The Fabian Society is a society for helping to bring about the socialization of the industrial resources of the country. The Social-Democratic Federation is a society for enlisting the whole proletariat of the country in its own ranks and itself socializing the national industry.” The policy of the one is fundamentally opportunist; of the other, implacably sectarian. The Federation counts no man a Socialist until he has joined it, and supports no man who is not a member; the Fabians advise concentration of strength to elect that candidate, be he Socialist or not, who gives the greatest promise of advancing, in greater or less degree, the general cause of Socialism. The Federation persistently claims to be the only genuine representative of working-class interests in England; the Fabians have never advanced the smallest pretensions in that direction. Its policy finds ample justification in the recent history of Continental Socialism. The tactics of the German Socialist Party, in the last few years, have been “Fabianized” by sheer force of circumstances; to-day, this party is, in great measure, both opportunist and constitutional, the two essential features of Fabian policy. Sharpened in wit by rigorous persecution, Liebknecht and his successor Bebel have learned the art of politics through experience and exigency. In contemporary France is witnessed the signal triumph of Fabian Socialism. The policy of Jaurès, although under the frown of the “International,” will be continued in France; and Guèsde, despite his barren victory at the International Socialist Congress at Amsterdam in 1904, will remain only vox clamantis in deserto. The history of the Fabian Society, which is the history of Shaw, in the last twenty years, bears evidence that the Fabians have stood in the very forefront of the battle for collectivist measures, municipal reforms, civic virtue and social progress. As Shaw wrote in 1900:
“In 1885 we agreed to give up the delightful ease of revolutionary heroics and take to the hard work of practical reform on ordinary parliamentary lines. In 1889 we published 'Fabian Essays' without a word in them about the value theory of Marx. In 1893 we made the first real attack made by Socialists on Liberalism, on which occasion the Social-Democratic Federation promptly joined in the Liberal outcry against us. In 1896 we affirmed that the object of Socialism was not to destroy private enterprise, but only to make the livelihood of the people independent of it by socializing the common industries of life, and driving private enterprise into its proper sphere of art, invention and new departures. This year we have led the way in getting rid of the traditional association of our movement with that romantic nationalism which is to the Pole and the Irishman what Jingoism is to the Englishman.... In short, the whole history of Socialism during the past fifteen years in England, France, Germany, Belgium, Austria and America, has been its disentanglement from the Liberal tradition stamped on Marx, Engels and Liebknecht in 1848, and its emergence in a characteristic and original form of its own, modified by national character, and, in England, calling itself Fabianism when it is self-conscious enough to call itself anything at all.”[88]
Strangely enough, in view of all the facts, it is customary to regard Shaw as a purely destructive and negative spirit. The truth is that Shaw stands for certain definite beliefs, certain undoubted principles. His is the belief of the unbeliever, the principle of the unprincipled, the faith of the sceptic.
Not less important than his destructive achievements has been his constructive work in practical affairs as Vestryman and Borough Councillor. Prior to 1895, roughly speaking, the vestries were ignorantly boasted of as the truest products of a representative democratic government. “The truth of the matter,” Mr. Shaw once remarked to me, “is that the vestry, as it was actually elected in those days—a few people getting together when nobody knew of it and at some place of which the public was not notified, and electing themselves members—could scarcely be called a representative democratic body. We Socialists finally began to realize that the way to get at the vestry was to put a programme into their hands. So we sent them all a pamphlet, requesting replies—a pamphlet entitled, 'Questions for Vestrymen,' or something of the sort. The vestrymen were thus forced to the wall and driven to decide upon issues. They actually began to make up their minds on many subjects of which hitherto they had had no conception. Slowly the vestries, under this discipline, began to take on a truly representative character. The personnel of the vestry was now permanently altered for the better. Men were elected who not only took an interest in municipal affairs, but likewise were willing to do any amount of hard work. I was 'co-opted'—i.e., chosen by the committee, by agreement with the opposite party, obviously beaten if a vote were taken. So that I was fortunate enough to escape the terrors of a popular election.”
It is quite beyond the scope of this book to enter into the details of Shaw's work as Vestryman, afterwards Borough Councillor. Suffice it to say, that he was chosen in 1897, entered at once upon the performance of his duties, and prosecuted them for several terms with great zeal and tireless energy. His various letters to the Press during that period, and occasional reminiscences, show that he was always outspoken and vehement in behalf of all reforms which tended to the betterment of the poorer classes, equalization of public privileges of men and women, better sanitary conditions, and the municipalization of such industries as promise to give the people at large better service and greater value for their money than privately operated concerns. The most tangible result of his work as Vestryman and Borough Councillor is his book, Municipal Trading, which he once told me he regarded as one of the best and most useful things he had ever done.[89]
At the expiration of his career as Borough Councillor, he stood as the candidate for the Borough of St. Pancras in the London County Council—the seat afterwards occupied by the well-known actor, Mr. George Alexander. “I was beaten,” Mr. Shaw recently told me, “because I alienated the Nonconformist element by favouring the improvement of the Church schools. I was convinced that such improvement would lead to the betterment of the education of the children. The Nonconformists were enraged beyond measure by the proposal, looking with the utmost horror upon any measure which tended to strengthen the Church. I remember one rabid Nonconformist coming to me one day, almost foaming at the mouth, and protesting with violent indignation that he would not pay a single cent towards the maintenance of the schools of the Established Church. 'Why, my dear fellow,' I replied, 'don't you know that you pay taxes now for the support of the Roman Catholic Church in the Island of Malta?' Although this staggered the irate Nonconformist for the moment, it did not reconcile his element to the extension of the principle to London. My contention was that under the conditions prevailing at the time, the children were poorly taught and poorly housed, the schools badly ventilated, and the conditions generally unsatisfactory. 'Improve all the conditions,' I said; 'appoint your own inspectors, and in the course of time you will control the situation. Pay the piper and you can call the tune.' But I could not override the tremendous prejudice against the Church, and I was badly beaten.” One of Shaw's intimate friends told me not long ago that what lost the seat in the L. C. C. for Shaw was his intrepid assertion, repeated throughout the campaign, that he and Voltaire were the only two truly religious people who had ever lived! Shaw's own account of this, when I taxed him with it, was that he had often pointed out that the religious opinions of the Free Churches (the Nonconformist sects) in England to-day were exactly those of Voltaire, and that what I had been told was quite as near his meaning as most people contrived to get without reading him. And only the other day a well-known politician and a friend of Shaw's made the remark to me that Shaw was an “impossible political candidate,” too rash and individualistic in his assertions to avoid alienating many people—even some of the very men who under ordinary circumstances might confidently be relied upon to support a progressive and energetic reformer.