The History of the Fabian Society

by Edward R. Pease

It is, however, possible to give some account of the organisation and activities for the year ending in March, 1889, since the first printed Annual Report covers that period. It is a four-page quarto document, only a few copies of which are preserved. Of the Society itself but little is recorded—a list of lectures and the bare statement that the autumn series were to be published: the fact that 6500 Fabian Tracts had been distributed and a second edition of 5000 "Facts for Socialists" printed: that 32 members had been elected and 6 had withdrawn—the total is not given—and that the deficit in the Society's funds had been reduced.

A favourite saying of Sidney Webb's is that the activity of the Fabian Society is the sum of the activities of its members. His report as Secretary of the work of the "Lecture Committee" states that a lecture list with 33 names had been printed, and returns made by 31 lecturers recorded 721 lectures during the year. Six courses of lectures on Economics accounted for 52 of these. The "Essays" series of lectures was redelivered by special request in a room lent by King's College, Cambridge, and also at Leicester. Most of the other lectures were given at London Radical Working Men's Clubs, then and for some years later a much bigger factor in politics than they have been in the twentieth century.

But an almost contemporary account of the life of Bernard Shaw, probably the most active of the leaders, because the least fettered by his occupation, is given in Tract 41 under the heading:

"HOW TO TRAIN FOR PUBLIC LIFE.

"We had to study where we could and how we could. I need not repeat the story of the Hampstead Historic Club, founded by a handful of us to read Marx and Proudhon, and afterwards turned into a systematic history class in which each student took his turn at being professor. My own experience may be taken as typical. For some years I attended the Hampstead Historic Club once a fortnight, and spent a night in the alternate weeks at a private circle of economists which has since blossomed into the British Economic Association—a circle where the social question was left out, and the work kept on abstract scientific lines. I made all my acquaintances think me madder than usual by the pertinacity with which I attended debating societies and haunted all sorts of hole-and-corner debates and public meetings and made speeches at them. I was President of the Local Government Board at an amateur Parliament where a Fabian ministry had to put its proposals into black and white in the shape of Parliamentary Bills. Every Sunday I lectured on some subject which I wanted to teach to myself; and it was not until I had come to the point of being able to deliver separate lectures, without notes, on Rent, Interest, Profits, Wages, Toryism, Liberalism, Socialism, Communism, Anarchism, Trade-Unionism, Co-operation, Democracy, the Division of Society into Classes, and the Suitability of Human Nature to Systems of Just Distribution, that I was able to handle Social-Democracy as it must be handled before it can be preached in such a way as to present it to every sort of man from his own particular point of view. In old lecture lists of the Society you will find my name down for twelve different lectures or so. Nowadays I have only one, for which the secretary is good enough to invent four or five different names. Sometimes I am asked for one of the old ones, to my great dismay, as I forget all about them; but I get out of the difficulty by delivering the new one under the old name, which does as well. I do not hesitate to say that all our best lecturers have two or three old lectures at the back of every single point in their best new speeches; and this means that they have spent a certain number of years plodding away at footling little meetings and dull discussions, doggedly placing these before all private engagements, however tempting. A man's Socialistic acquisitiveness must be keen enough to make him actually prefer spending two or three nights a week in speaking and debating, or in picking up social information even in the most dingy and scrappy way, to going to the theatre, or dancing or drinking, or even sweethearting, if he is to become a really competent propagandist—unless, of course, his daily work is of such a nature as to be in itself a training for political life; and that, we know, is the case with very few of us indeed. It is at such lecturing and debating work, and on squalid little committees and ridiculous little delegations to conferences of the three tailors of Tooley Street, with perhaps a deputation to the Mayor thrown in once in a blue moon or so, that the ordinary Fabian workman or clerk must qualify for his future seat on the Town Council, the School Board, or perhaps in the Cabinet. It was in that way that Bradlaugh, for instance, graduated from being a boy evangelist to being one of the most formidable debaters in the House of Commons. And the only opponents who have ever held their own against the Fabians in debate have been men like Mr. Levy or Mr. Foote, who learnt in the same school."

But lecturing was not the only activity of the Fabians. There were at that time local Groups, each comprising one or a dozen constituencies in London and its suburbs. The Groups in a corporate capacity did little: but the members are reported as taking part in local elections, County Council, School Board, and Vestry, in the meetings of the London Liberal and Radical Union, the National Liberal Federation, the Metropolitan Radical Federation, the Women's Liberal Federation, and so on. This was the year of the first London County Council Election, when the Progressive Party, as it was subsequently named, won an unexpected victory, which proved to be both lasting and momentous for the future of the Metropolis. The only overt part taken by the Fabian Society was its "Questions for Candidates," printed and widely circulated before the election, which gave definiteness and point to the vague ideas of Progressivism then in the air. A large majority of the successful candidates had concurred with this programme. A pamphlet by Sidney Webb, entitled "Wanted a Programme," not published but printed privately, was widely circulated in time for the meeting of the National Liberal Federation at Birmingham, and another by the same author, "The Progress of Socialism," stated to be published by "the Hampstead Society for the Study of Socialism," is reported as in its second edition. This pamphlet was later republished by the Fabian Society as Tract No. 15, "English Progress Towards Social Democracy."

Mrs. Besant and the Rev. Stewart Headlam, standing as Progressives, were elected to the School Board in November, 1888, when Hubert Bland was an unsuccessful candidate.

Finally it may be mentioned that a Universities Committee, with Frank Podmore as Secretary for Oxford and G.W. Johnson for Cambridge, had begun the "permeation" of the Universities, which has always been an important part of the propaganda of the Society.

At the Annual Meeting in April, 1889, the Essayists were re-elected as the Executive Committee and Sydney Olivier as Honorary Secretary, but he only retained the post till the end of the year. I returned to London in October, was promptly invited to resume the work, and took it over in January, 1890.

In July another important tract was approved for publication. "Facts for Londoners," No. 8 in the series, 55 pages of packed statistics sold for 6d., was the largest publication the Society had yet attempted. It is, as its sub-title states: "an exhaustive collection of statistical and other facts relating to the Metropolis, with suggestions for reform on Socialist principles," The latter were in no sense concealed: the Society still waved the red flag in season and out. "The Socialist Programme of immediately practicable reforms for London cannot be wholly dissociated from the corresponding Programme for the kingdom." This is the opening sentence, and it is followed by a page of explanation of the oppression of the workers by the private appropriation of rent and interest, and an outline of the proposed reforms, graduated and differentiated income tax, increased death duties, extension of the Factory Acts, reform of the Poor Law, payment of all public representatives, adult suffrage, and several others.