Fabian Essays in Socialism

by Unknown

The only really effective weapon of the press against Socialism is silence. Even Bishops cannot get reported when they advocate Socialism and tear to pieces the old pretence that political economy, science, and religion are in favor of our existing industrial system. Socialist speakers now find audiences so readily that, even with comparatively high charges for admission, large halls can be filled to hear them without resorting to the usual channels of advertisement. Their speeches are crammed with facts and figures and irresistible appeals to the daily experience and money troubles of the unfortunate ratepayers and rent-payers who are too harassed by money worries to care about official party politics; but not a word of these is allowed to leak through to the public through the ordinary channels of newspaper reporting. However, the conspiracy of silence has its uses to us. We have converted the people who have actually heard us. The others, having no news of our operations, have left us unmolested until our movement has secured its grip of the public. Now that the alarm has at last been given, nobody, it seems, is left in the camp of our enemies except the ignorant, the politically imbecile, the corruptly interested, and the retinue of broken, drunken, reckless mercenaries who are always ready to undertake a campaign of slander against the opponents of any vested interest which has a bountiful secret service fund. This may seem a strong thing to say; but it is impossible not to be struck by the feebleness and baseness of the opposition to Socialism to-day as compared with the opposition of twenty years ago. In the days when Herbert Spencer’s brightest pupils, from Mrs. Sidney Webb to Grant Allen, turned from him to the Socialism in which he could see nothing but “the coming slavery,” we could respect him whilst confuting him. To-day we neither respect our opponents nor confute them. We simply, like Mrs. Stetson Gillman’s prejudice slayer, “walk through them as if they were not there.”

Still, we do not affect to underrate the huge public danger of a press which is necessarily in the hands of the very people whose idleness and extravagance keep the nation poor and miserable in spite of its immense resources. It costs quarter of a million to start a London daily paper with any chance of success; and every man who writes for it risks his livelihood every time he pens a word that threatens the incomes of the proprietors and their class. The quantity of snobbish and anti-social public opinion thus manufactured is formidable; and a new sort of crime—the incitement by newspapers of mobs to outrage and even murder—hitherto tried only on religious impostors, is beginning to be applied to politics. The result is likely to be another illustration of the impossibility of combining individual freedom with economic slavery. We have had to throw freedom of contract to the winds to save the working classes from extermination as a result of “free” contracts between penniless fathers of starving families and rich employers. Freedom of the press is hardly less illusory when the press belongs to the slave owners of the nation, and not a single journalist is really free. We think it well therefore at this moment to warn our readers not to measure the extent of our operations or our influence, much less the strength of our case, by what they read of us in the papers. The taste for spending one’s life in drudgery and never-ending pecuniary anxiety solely in order that certain idle and possibly vicious people may fleece you for their own amusement, is not so widespread as the papers would have us think. Even that timidest of Conservatives, the middle class man with less than £500 a year (sometimes less than £100) is beginning to ask himself why his son should go, half-educated, to a clerk’s desk at fifteen, to enable another man’s son to go to a university and complete an education of which, as a hereditary idler, he does not intend to make use. To tell him that such self-questioning is a grave symptom of Free Love and Atheism may terrify him; but it does not convince. And the evolution of Socialism from the Red spectre on the barricade, with community of wives (all petroleuses), and Compulsory Atheism, to the Fabian Society and the Christian Social Union, constitutional, respectable, even official, eminent, and titled, is every day allaying his dread of it and increasing his scepticism as to the inevitability of the ever more and more dreaded knock of the ground landlord’s agent and the rate collector.

Now, as everyone knows, the course of evolution, in Socialism or anything else, does not involve the transformation of the earlier forms into the later. The earlier forms persist side by side with the later until they are either deliberately exterminated by them or put out of countenance so completely that they lose the heart to get born. This is what has happened in the evolution of Fabian Socialism. Fabian Socialism has not exterminated the earlier types; and though it has put them so much out of countenance that they no longer breed freely, still there they are still, preaching, collecting subscriptions, and repulsing from Socialism many worthy citizens who are quite prepared to go as far, and farther, than the Fabian Society. Occasionally they manage even to contest a Parliamentary seat in the name of Socialism, and to reassure the Capitalist parties by coming out at the foot of the poll with fewer votes than one would have thought possible for any human candidate, were he even a flat-earth-man, in these days when everyone can find a following of some sort. More often, however, they settle down into politically negligible sects, with a place of weekly meeting in which they preach to one another every week, except in the summer months, when they carry the red flag into the open air and denounce society as it passes or loiters to listen. Now far be it from us to repudiate these comrades. If a man has been brought to conviction of sin by the Countess of Huntingdon’s Connexion, and subsequently enters the Church and becomes an Archbishop, he will always have sufficient tenderness for the Connexion to refrain from attacking it, and to remember that many of its members are better Christians and better men than the more worldly-wise pillars of the Church. The principal leaders of the Fabian movement are in the same position with regard to many little societies locally known as “the Socialists.” We know that their worship of Marx (of whose works they are for the most part ignorant, and of whose views they are intellectually incapable) and their repetition of shibboleths about the Class War and the socialization of all the means of production, distribution, and exchange have no more application to practical politics than the Calvinistic covenants which so worried Cromwell when he, too, tried to reconcile his sectarian creed with the practical exigencies of government and administration. We know also, and are compelled on occasion to say bluntly out, that these little sects are ignorant and incapable in public affairs; that in many cases their assumption of an extreme position is an excuse for doing nothing under cover of demanding the impossible; and that their inability to initiate any practical action when they do by chance get represented on public bodies often leads to their simply voting steadily for our opponents by way of protest against what they consider the compromising opportunism of the Fabians. There are moments when they become so intolerable a nuisance to the main body of the movement that we are sorely tempted to excommunicate them formally, and warn the public that they represent nobody but their silly selves. But such a declaration, though it would be perfectly true as far as political and administrative action is concerned, would be misleading on the whole. In England, everyone begins by being absurdly ignorant of public life and inept at public action. Just as the Conservative and Liberal Parties are recruited at Primrose League meetings and Liberal and Radical demonstrations at which hardly one word of sense or truth is uttered, but at which nevertheless the novice finds himself in a sympathetic atmosphere, so even the Fabian Society consists largely of Socialists who sowed their wild oats in one or other of these little sects of Impossibilists. Therefore we not only suffer them as gladly as human nature allows, but give them what help and countenance we can when we can do so without specifically endorsing their blunders. Fortunately the immense additions which have been made to the machinery of democracy in England in the last twenty years, from the County Councils of 1888 to the education authorities of 1902, have acted as schools of public life to thousands of men of small means who in the old days must have remained Impossibilists from want of public experience. One hour on a responsible committee of a local authority which has to provide for some public want and spend some public money, were it but half a crown, will cure any sensible man of Impossibilism for the rest of his life. And such cures are taking place every day, and converting futile enthusiasts into useful Fabians.

A word as to this book. It is not a new edition of Fabian Essays. They are reprinted exactly as they appeared in 1889, nothing being changed but the price. No other course was possible. When the essays were written, the Essayists were in their thirties: they are now in their fifties, except the one, William Clarke, who is in his grave. We were then regarded as young desperadoes who had sacrificed their chances in life by committing themselves publicly to Socialism: we are now quoted as illustrations of the new theory that Socialists, like Quakers, prosper in this world. It is a dangerous theory; for Socialism, like all religions and all isms, can turn weak heads as well as inspire and employ strong ones; but we, at all events, have been fortunate enough to have had our claim to public attention admitted in the nineteen years which have elapsed since our youthful escapade as Fabian Essayists.

It goes without saying that in our present position, and with the experience we have gained, we should produce a very different book if the work were to be done anew. We should not waste our time in killing dead horses, however vigorously they were kicking in 1889. We should certainly be much more careful not to give countenance to the notion that the unemployed can be set to work to inaugurate Socialism; though it remains true that the problem of the unemployed, from the moment when we cease to abandon them callously to their misery or soothe our consciences foolishly by buying them off with alms, will force us to organize them, provide for them, and train them; but the very first condition of success in this will be the abandonment of the old idea that the unemployed tailor can be set to make clothes for the unemployed bootmaker and the unemployed bootmaker to make boots for the unemployed tailor, the real difficulty being, not a scarcity of clothes and boots, but a stupid misdistribution of the money to buy them. We should also probably lay more stress on human volition and less on economic pressure and historic evolution as making for Socialism. We should, in short, give the dry practice of our solutions of social problems instead of the inspiration and theory of them. But we should also produce a volume which, though it might appeal more than the present one to administrative experts, to bankers, lawyers, and constructive statesmen, would have much less charm for the young, and for the ordinary citizen who is in these matters an amateur.

Besides, the difference between the view of the young and the elderly is not necessarily a difference between wrong and right. The Tennysonian process of making stepping stones of our dead selves to higher things is pious in intention, but it sometimes leads downstairs instead of up. When Herbert Spencer in his later days expunged from his Social Statics the irresistible arguments for Land Nationalization by which he anticipated Henry George, we could not admit that the old Spencer had any right to do this violence to the young Spencer, or was less bound either to confute his position or admit it than if the two had been strangers to one another. Having had this lesson, we do not feel free to alter even those passages which no longer represent our latest conclusions. Fortunately, in the main we have nothing to withdraw, nothing to regret, nothing to apologize for, and much to be proud of. So we leave our book as it first came into the world, merely writing “Errors Excepted” as solicitors do: that is, with the firm conviction that the errors, if they exist at all, do not greatly matter.

21st May, 1908.

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.