Similar tracts were published describing the powers and duties of the London County Council, the London Vestries, and the Metropolitan Borough Councils, established in 1899, while one giving the powers of various local authorities for housing (No. 76, "Houses for the People") has gone through many editions and still has a steady sale.
The Workmen's Compensation Act, 1897, afforded another opportunity for this sort of work. Our penny tract (No. 82) describing the rights of the workmen under the Act was reprinted thirteen times in eight months, and over 120,000 were sold in the first year of publication. This tract offered free advice to every purchaser, and the result has been an enormous amount of correspondence which during seventeen years has never entirely ceased. This work of providing expert advice on minor legal matters has been a quiet service to the community constantly rendered by the Society. The barristers amongst our members have freely given assistance in the more difficult matters. Occasionally the solicitors amongst us have taken up cases where the plaintiff was specially helpless.
In 1894, Henry Hutchinson, who had provided the funds for much of our country lecturing, died, and to our complete surprise it was found that he had appointed Sidney Webb, whom he hardly knew personally, his executor, and had left the residue of his estate, between £9000 and £10,000, to five trustees—Sidney Webb, his daughter, myself, William Clarke, and W.S. De Mattos—with directions that the whole sum be expended within ten years. The two last named took but little part in administering the trust, and Miss Hutchinson died only fifteen months later, also leaving to her colleagues the residue of her estate, something under £1000, for similar purposes. The trustees—Mrs. Bernard Shaw, Hubert Bland, and Frederick Whelen were appointed at later dates—resolved that the money in their charge should be used exclusively for special work, as otherwise the effect would be merely to relieve the members of their obligation to pay for the maintenance of their Society. They decided to devote part of the funds to initiating the London School of Economics and Political Science, because they considered that a thorough knowledge of these sciences was a necessity for people concerned in social reconstruction, if that reconstruction was to be carried out with prudence and wisdom: and in particular it was essential that all classes of public officials should have the opportunity of learning whatever can be known of economics and politics taught on modern lines. Our old Universities provided lectures on political science as it was understood by Plato and Aristotle, by Hobbes and Bentham: they did not then—and indeed they do not now—teach how New Zealand deals with strikes, how America legislates about trusts, how municipalities all over the world organise tramways.
The trustees, as I have said, originated the London School of Economics, but from the first they associated others with themselves in its management, and they made no attempt to retain any special share in its control. Their object was to get taught the best science that could be obtained, confident that if their own political theories were right, science would confirm them, and if they were wrong, it was better that they should be discredited. The London School of Economics, though thus founded, has never had any direct or organic connection with the Fabian Society, and therefore any further account of its successful career would be out of place in this volume. But it may be said that it has certainly more than justified the hopes of its founders, or rather, to be accurate, I should say, founder, since the other trustees were wholly guided by the initiative of Sidney Webb.
Besides the School, and the Library connected with it, the Trust promoted for many years regular courses of Fabian educational lectures on social and political subjects, such as Socialism, Trade Unionism, Co-operation, Poor Law, Economics, and Economic History. Lecturers were selected with care, and were in some cases given a maintenance allowance during the preparation of their lectures. Then arrangements were made for courses of four lectures each, on what may be called University Extension lines, in four or five centres in one part of the country. For example, in the year 1896-7 180 lectures were given in fifty towns, half of them under the auspices of branches of the I.L.P., and the rest organised by Co-operative Societies, Liberal Associations, Trade Unions, and other bodies. Very careful syllabuses were prepared and widely circulated, and the whole scheme was intended to be educational rather than directly propagandist. The first lecturers engaged were J. Ramsay Macdonald and Miss Enid Stacy, whose premature death, a few years after her marriage to the Rev. Percy Widdrington, was a great loss to the movement. This lecturing was maintained for many years. In 1900, shortly after the creation there of County and District Councils, we experimented upon Ireland, where J. Bruce Glasier and S.D. Shallard gave a number of courses of lectures, without any very obvious results. In 1902 W. Stephen Sanders took over the work, but the fund was coming to an end, and after 1904 subsidised lecturing virtually ceased.
In order to help working-class students who had the desire to study more continuously than by attendance at lectures, correspondence classes were started in the same class of subject as the lectures. A textbook was selected and divided into sections, to each of which an introduction was written, concluding with questions. Written answers were sent in and corrected by the conductor of the class. This went on regularly until 1900, when Ruskin College, Oxford, organised similar classes on a larger scale, and our services were no longer required.