FABIAN
ESSAYS IN SOCIALISM
BY
G. BERNARD SHAW
SIDNEY WEBB
WILLIAM CLARKE
SYDNEY OLIVIER
ANNIE BESANT
GRAHAM WALLAS
AND
HUBERT BLAND
EDITED BY
G. BERNARD SHAW
_With a new preface for this edition by Mr. Shaw_
BOSTON
THE BALL PUBLISHING CO.
1911
_Copyright, 1908_
BY GEORGE BERNARD SHAW
CONTENTS.
THE FABIAN SOCIETY AND ITS WORK.
BY WILLIAM CLARKE. Page xxiii.
THE BASIS OF SOCIALISM.
ECONOMIC BY G. BERNARD SHAW.
RENT. The Cultivation and Population of the Earth.--Economic
Origin of the County Family.--Economic Rent of Land and
Ability.--Tenant Right.--The Advent of the Proletarian. Page 1.
VALUE. Mechanism of Exchange.--Price and Utility.--Effects
of Supply.--Law of Indifference.--Total and Final Utility.--Relation
of Value to Cost of Production. Page 9.
WAGES. The Proletariat.--Sale of Labor.--Subsistence
Wage.--Capitalism.--Increase of Riches and Decrease of
Wealth.--Divorce of Exchange Value from Social Utility. Page 15.
CONCLUSION. Apparent Discrepancies between History and
Theory.--Socialism.--Pessimism and Private Property.--Economic
Soundness of Meliorism. Page 20.
HISTORIC BY SIDNEY WEBB, LL.B., BARRISTER AT LAW,
LECTURER ON POLITICAL ECONOMY AT THE CITY OF LONDON COLLEGE.
THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE DEMOCRATIC IDEAL. Ancestry of
English Socialism.--The Utopians.--Introduction of the Conception
of Evolution.--The Lesson of Democracy. Page 26.
THE DISINTEGRATION OF THE OLD SYNTHESIS. The Decay of
Medievalism.--The Industrial Revolution.--The French Revolution.--The
Progress of Democracy. Page 31.
THE PERIOD OF ANARCHY. Individualism.--Philosophic Radicalism
and _Laisser-faire_.--The Utilitarian Analysis. Page 35.
THE INTELLECTUAL AND MORAL REVOLT; AND ITS POLITICAL
OUTCOME. The Poets, Communists, Philosophers, Christian Socialists,
and Evolutionists.--The Extension of State Activity.--Existing State
Registration, Inspection, and Direct Organization of Labor.--The
Radical Programme. Page 40.
THE NEW SYNTHESIS. Evolution and the Social Organism.--Liberty
and Equality.--Social Health. Page 50.
INDUSTRIAL BY WILLIAM CLARKE, M.A., CAMBRIDGE.
THE SUPERSESSION OF INDIVIDUALIST PRODUCTION. The Cottage
Industry.--The Mechanical Inventions.--The Factory System. Page 56.
THE GROWTH OF THE GREAT INDUSTRY. The Expansion of Lancashire.--The
White Slavery.--State Interference. Page 65.
THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE WORLD-COMMERCE. The Triumph
of Free Trade.--The Fight for New Markets.--The Carriers of the
World. Page 71.
THE DIFFERENTIATION OF MANAGER AND CAPITALIST. The Rise
of Co-operation and the Joint Stock Company.--The “Ring” and the
“Trust.”--The Despotism of Capitalist Communism. Page 76.
MORAL BY SYDNEY OLIVIER, B.A., OXFORD.
THE EVOLUTION OF MORALITY. The Common End.--The Conditions
of Freedom.--The Individual and the Race.--The Growth of
Social Consciousness.--Convention and Law. Page 93.
PROPERTY AND MORALS. The Reaction of Property-Forms on Moral
Ideas.--Class Morality.--Negation of the Conditions of
Freedom.--Social Dissolution. Page 104.
THE RE-INTEGRATION OF SOCIETY. The Ordering of the Primary
Conditions.--The Idea of the Poor Law.--Secondary
Conditions.--Morality and Reason.--The Idea of the School. Page 112.
THE ORGANIZATION OF SOCIETY.
PROPERTY UNDER SOCIALISM. BY GRAHAM WALLAS, M.A., OXFORD.
VISIBLE WEALTH. Consumers’ Capital.--Producers’ Capital. Page 120.
DEBTS AND SERVICES. Deferred and Anticipated
Consumption.--Interest. Page 125.
IDEAS. Copyright and Patent Right.--Education. Page 132.
INDUSTRY UNDER SOCIALISM BY ANNIE BESANT.
THE ORGANIZATION OF LABOR. Rural.--Urban.--International. Page 136.
THE DISTRIBUTION OF THE PRODUCT. The Individual.--The
Municipality.--The State. Page 147.
SOCIAL SAFEGUARDS. The Stimulus to Labor.--The Provision
for Initiative.--The Reward of Excellence. Page 150.
THE TRANSITION TO SOCIAL DEMOCRACY.
TRANSITION BY G. BERNARD SHAW.
MEDIEVALISM TO CAPITALISM. The Old Order.--Merchant Adventurer,
Pirate, Slave-Trader, Capitalist.--The Old Order burst by the
New Growth.--Chaos. Page 157.
ANARCHY TO STATE INTERFERENCE. Political Economy.--Hegelian
Conception of the Perfect State.--Socialism: Its Practical
Difficulties.--Impracticability of Catastrophic Change.--Democracy
the Antidote to Bureaucracy.--The State Interferes. Page 160.
STATE INTERFERENCE TO STATE ORGANIZATION. Hard Times.--Revival of
Revolutionary Socialism.--Remaining Steps to the Consummation of
Democracy.--Machinery of Socialism.--Social Pressure.--Urban
Rents.--The New Taxation.--State Organization of Labor its
Indispensable Complement.--The Unemployed.--Solution of the
Compensation Difficulty.--Economic Reactions of the Progress
of Municipal Socialism.--Militant Socialism Abandoned but not
Dishonored. Page 169.
THE OUTLOOK BY HUBERT BLAND.
THE CONDITION OF ENGLISH PARTIES. The Lines of Progress.--The
Rate of Progress in Thought and Industry Compared with that in
Politics.--Alleged Disappearance of the Whig. Page 184.
THE SOCIALIZING OF POLITICS. Political Myopia.--Sham Socialism.--Red
Herrings.--Dreams of Permeating the Liberal
Party.--Disillusionment.--The New Departure. Page 189.
THE DUTIES OF THE HOUR. The True Line of Cleavage.--Hopes
and Fears.--The Solidarity of the Workers. Page 198.
INDEX. Page 203.
THE FABIAN SOCIETY AND ITS WORK.
PREFACE TO THE 1908 EDITION
Since 1889 the Socialist movement has been completely transformed
throughout Europe; and the result of the transformation may fairly be
described as Fabian Socialism. In the eighteen-eighties, when Socialism
revived in England for the first time since the suppression of the
Paris Commune in 1871, it was not at first realized that what had
really been suppressed for good and all was the romantic revolutionary
Liberalism and Radicalism of 1848, to which the Socialists had attached
themselves as a matter of course, partly because they were themselves
romantic and revolutionary, and partly because both Liberals and
Socialists had a common object in Democracy.
Besides this common object the two had a common conception of
method in revolution. They were both catastrophists. Liberalism had
conquered autocracy and bureaucracy by that method in England and
France, and then left industry to make what it could of the new
political conditions by the unregulated action of competition between
individuals. Briefly, the Liberal plan was to cut off the King’s head,
and leave the rest to Nature, which was supposed to gravitate towards
economic harmonies when not restrained by tyrannical governments. The
Socialists were very far ahead of the Liberals in their appreciation
of the preponderant importance of industry, even going so far as to
maintain, with Buckle and Marx, that all social institutions whatever
were imposed by economic conditions, and that there was fundamentally
only one tyranny: the tyranny of Capital. Yet even the Socialists
had so far formed their political habits in the Liberal school that
they were quite disposed to believe that if you cut off the head of
King Capital, you might expect to see things come right more or less
spontaneously.
No doubt this general statement shews the Revolutionaries of 1848-71
as simpler than they appear on their own records. Proudhon was full of
proposals: one of them, the minimum wage, turns out to be of the very
first importance now that Mr. and Mrs. Sidney Webb have put the case
for it on an invincible basis of industrial fact and economic theory.
Lassalle really knew something of the nature of law, the practice
of Government, and the mind of the governing classes. Marx, though
certainly a bit of a Liberal fatalist (did he not say that force is
the midwife of progress without reminding us that force is equally
the midwife of chaos, and chaos the midwife of martial law?), was at
all events no believer in _Laisser-faire_. Socialism involves the
introduction of design, contrivance, and co-ordination, by a nation
consciously seeking its own collective welfare, into the present
industrial scramble for private gain; and as it is clear that this
cannot be a spontaneous result of a violent overthrow of the existing
order, and as the Socialists of 1848-71 were not blind, it would be
impossible to substantiate a claim for Fabian Essays as the first
text-book of Socialism in which catastrophism is repudiated as a method
of Socialism.
Therefore we must not say that the Revolutionists and Internationalists
of 1848-71 believed in a dramatic overthrow of the capitalist system
in a single convulsion, followed by the establishment of a new heaven,
a new earth, and a new humanity. They were visionaries, no doubt:
all political idealists are; but they were quite as practical as the
Conservatives and Liberals who now believe that the triumph of their
party will secure the happiness and peace of the country. All the
same, it was almost impossible to induce them to speak or think of the
Socialist state of the future in terms of the existing human material
for it. They talked of Communes, and, more vaguely and less willingly,
of central departments to co-ordinate the activities of the Communes;
but if you ventured to point out that these apparently strange and
romantic inventions were simply city corporations under the Local
Government Board, they vehemently repudiated such a construction,
and accused you of reading the conditions of the present system into
Socialism. They had all the old Liberal mistrust of governments and
bureaucracy and all the old tendency of bourgeois revolutionists
to idolize the working class. They had no suspicion of the extent
to which the very existence of society depends on the skilled work
of administrators and experts, or how much wisdom and strength of
character is required for their control by popular representatives.
They actually believed that when their efforts throughout Europe had
demonstrated the economics of Socialism to the proletariats of the
great capitals, the cry “Proletarians of all lands: unite,” would be
responded to; and that Capitalism would fall before an International
Federation of the working classes of Europe, not in the sense in
which some future historian will summarize two or three centuries
(in which sense they may prove right enough), but as an immediate
practical plan of action likely to be carried through in twenty years
by Socialist societies holding completely and disdainfully aloof from
ordinary politics. In short, they were romantic amateurs, and, as
such, were enormously encouraged and flattered when Marx and Engels
insisted on the “scientific” character of their movement in contrast
to the “Utopian” Socialism of Owen, Fourier, St. Simon, and the men
of the 1820-48 phase. When the events of 1871 in Paris tested them
practically, their hopeless public incapacity forced their opponents to
exterminate them in the most appalling massacre of modern times--all
the more ghastly because it was a massacre of the innocents.
Public opinion in Europe was reconciled to the massacre by the usual
process of slandering the victims. Now had Europe been politically
educated no slanders would have been necessary; for even had it been
humanly possible that all the Federals mown down with mitrailleuses
in Paris were incendiaries and assassins, it would still have been
questionable whether indiscriminate massacre is the right way to deal
with incendiaries and assassins. But there can be no question as to
what must be done with totally incompetent governors. The one thing
that is politically certain nowadays is that if a body of men upset the
existing government of a modern state without sufficient knowledge and
capacity to continue the necessary and honest part of its work, and
if, being unable to do that work themselves, they will not let anyone
else do it either, their extermination becomes a matter of immediate
necessity. It will avail them nothing that they aim higher than their
fathers did; that their intentions are good, their action personally
disinterested, and their opponents selfish and venal routineers who
would themselves be equally at a loss if they had to create a new
order instead of merely pulling the wires of an old one. Anyone who
looks at the portraits of the members of the Paris Commune can see at
a glance that they compared very favorably in all the external signs
of amiability and refinement with any governing body then or now in
power in Europe. But they could not manage the business they took upon
themselves; and Thiers could. Marx’s demonstration that they were
heroes and martyrs and that Thiers and his allies were rascals did
not help in the least, though it was undeniably the ablest document
in the conflict of moral clap-trap that obscured the real issues--so
able indeed as a piece of literature, that more than thirty years after
its publication it struck down the Marquis de Gallifet as if it had
appeared in the _Temps_ or _Débats_ of the day before. It was amiable
of the Federals to be so much less capable of exterminating Thiers than
he was of exterminating them; but sentimental amiability is not by
itself a qualification for administering great modern States.
Now the Fabian Society, born in 1884, and reaching the age of
discretion in less than two years, had no mind to be exterminated.
Martyrdom was described by one of us as “the only way in which a man
can become famous without ability.” Further, we had no illusions as
to the treatment we should receive if, like the Paris Federals, we
terrified the property classes before they were disabled by a long
series of minor engagements. In Paris in 1871, ordinary sane people
hid themselves in their houses for weeks under the impression that
the streets were not safe: they did not venture out until they ran a
serious risk of being shot at sight by their own partisans in the orgy
of murder and cruelty that followed the discovery that the Commune
could fight only as a rat fights in a corner. Human nature has not
changed since then. In 1906 a Fabian essayist stood one May morning
in the Rue de Rivoli, and found himself almost the only soul in the
west end of Paris who dared appear there. The cultured inhabitants of
that select quarter were hiding in their houses as before, with their
larders full of hams and their baths full of live fish to provision
them for a siege. There was much less danger of a revolution that
day than there is of Primrose Hill becoming an active volcano at six
o’clock this evening; and the purpose of the Government and its party
newspapers in manufacturing the scare to frighten the bourgeoisie
into supporting them at the general election just then beginning was
obvious, one would have thought, to the dimmest political perspicacity.
In the evening that same essayist, in the Place de la Révolution, saw
a crowd of sightseers assembled to witness the promised insurrection,
and the troops and the police assembled to save society from it. It
was very like Trafalgar Square in 1887, when the same violent farce
was enacted in London. Occasionally the troops rode down some of the
sightseers and the police arrested some of them. Enough persons lost
their temper to make a few feeble attempts at riot, and to supply
arrests for the morning papers. Next day Society, saved, came out of
its hiding places; sold the fish from its baths and the hams from
its larders at a sacrifice (the weather being very hot and the hams
in questionable condition); and voted gratefully for the government
that had frightened it out of its senses with an imaginary revolution
and a ridiculous “complot.” England laughed at the Parisians (though
plenty of English visitors had left Paris to avoid the threatened Reign
of Terror); yet in the very next month our own propertied classes
in Cairo, terrified by the Nationalist movement in Egypt, fell into
a paroxysm of cowardice and cruelty, and committed the Denshawai
atrocity, compared to which the massacre of Glencoe was a trifle. The
credulity which allows itself to be persuaded by reiteration of the
pious word Progress that we live in a gentler age than our fathers,
and that the worst extremities of terror and vengeance are less to be
apprehended from our newly enriched automobilist classes than they
were from the aristocracies of the older orders, is not a Fabian
characteristic. The Fabian knows that property does not hesitate to
shoot, and that now, as always, the unsuccessful revolutionist may
expect calumny, perjury, cruelty, judicial and military massacre
without mercy. And the Fabian does not intend to get thus handled if he
can help it. If there is to be any shooting, he intends to be at the
State end of the gun. And he knows that it will take him a good many
years to get there. Still, he thinks he sees his way--or rather the
rest of his way; for he is already well on the road.
It was in 1885 that the Fabian Society, amid the jeers of the
catastrophists, turned its back on the barricades and made up its
mind to turn heroic defeat into prosaic success. We set ourselves two
definite tasks: first, to provide a parliamentary program for a Prime
Minister converted to Socialism as Peel was converted to Free Trade;
and second, to make it as easy and matter-of-course for the ordinary
respectable Englishman to be a Socialist as to be a Liberal or a
Conservative.
These tasks we have accomplished, to the great disgust of our more
romantic comrades. Nobody now conceives Socialism as a destructive
insurrection ending, if successful, in millennial absurdities.
Membership of the Fabian Society, though it involves an express
avowal of Socialism, excites no more comment than membership of the
Society of Friends, or even of the Church of England. Incidentally,
Labor has been organized as a separate political interest in the
House of Commons, with the result that in the very next Budget it was
confessed for the first time that there are unearned as well as earned
incomes in the country; an admission which, if not a surrender of the
Capitalist citadel to Socialism, is at all events letting down the
drawbridge; for Socialism, on its aggressive side, is, and always has
been, an attack on idleness. The resolution to make an end of private
property is gathering force every day: people are beginning to learn
the difference between a man’s property in his walking stick, which
is strictly limited by the public condition that he shall not use it
to break his neighbor’s head or extort money with menaces, and those
private rights of property which enable the idle to levy an enormous
tribute, amounting at present to no less than £630,000,000 a year, on
the earnings of the rest of the community. The old attempt to confuse
the issue by asserting that the existence of the family, religion,
marriage, etc., etc., are inextricably bound up with the toleration
of senseless social theft no longer imposes on anyone: after a whole
year of unexampled exploitation of this particular variety of obscene
vituperation by the most widely read cheap newspapers in London, no
Socialist is a penny the worse for it.
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.
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.