done? At first the idea of its members was rather to discuss among
themselves and teach themselves than to teach others. This was the
initial or self-forming stage. Then came the educational stage, and,
third, the political or active stage, though even in this, its third
stage, education is still the main object of the society. Fortnightly
discussions have been kept up continuously, save for a two months’
summer recess, for years. At these members of the society read papers,
or outsiders, and notably opponents, were invited. The late Charles
Bradlaugh came to oppose, and was very promptly demolished; while, on
the other hand, Oscar Wilde has spoken with eloquence and power on
the relation of art and Socialism. The society tried to get Mr. A.
J. Balfour, the Conservative leader, and Mr. W. H. Mallock, as the
ablest literary opponent of Socialism, to come and argue seriously,
but neither of them would do so. Mr. Haldene, the translator of
Schopenhauer and cultured philosophic member of Parliament, came
to oppose, was handled rather vigorously, and has now been largely
converted to collectivism. Mr. David F. Schloss, whom the British
Government recently sent over to the United States to inquire into
labor matters, has spoken sympathetically; and Mr. Donisthorpe, the
clever, cynical, superficial English individualist, has spoken and
has been mercilessly handled. The result of all this debating is that
the Fabian Society has now some of the best debaters in England. It
has also some of the best lecturers, for it is in lectures that its
work has largely consisted. The society now gives something over one
thousand lectures a year, all free, the lecturers being all unpaid.
Indeed, excepting the secretary’s office, the whole of the society’s
work is voluntary, unpaid work. The majority of these lectures
are given in workmen’s clubs, of which there are some hundreds in
London alone. I take at random from the 1891 list of lectures sample
subjects:--
The Socialism of John Ruskin; The Eight Hours’ Bill; Railway Reform;
Liberty, Equality, Fraternity; Methods of Social Evolution; Adam, the
first and last Individualist; Why we want a Labor Party; The Gospel
of getting on; What the Farm Laborers want; The Social Hell and its
Sources; Experiments in Housing the People; Socialism and Individual
Liberty; the Church’s Message to Men of Wealth; Free Comments on the
Population Question; The Worker’s Share of Wealth; The Programme
of Social Democracy; John Lilburne and the Levellers; The Chartist
Movement; The Religion of Socialism; the Industrial History of England;
Gospel of Bread and Butter; Workingmen and their Difficulties;
Co-operative Production and Socialism; Wealth and the Commonwealth; The
French Revolution; The Right to Live; What Socialists Propose to Do;
Twenty Years of the Labor Movement.
From these it will be seen what extensive ground is covered. These
lectures are for the most part delivered to workingmen, but sometimes
there are middle-class audiences, and I have heard of Fabian lecturers
talking to people in aristocratic drawing-rooms. From the first, the
society has done some publishing, and the last list gives no fewer than
forty-five pamphlets or tracts issued by the society. The first of
these, “Why are the Many Poor?” was a crude one, but good for rousing
attention, which is always the first thing to be done, and quite
justifying some curious Socialistic vagaries. The most valuable of
these pamphlets are “Facts for Socialists,” a really crushing answer
to those whom Matthew Arnold calls the “self-complacent moles,” all
based on the best available statistics; “Facts for Londoners,” an
appalling generalization of the economic condition of London; “What
to Read,” a most admirable and impartially selected list of books for
social reformers, which might with advantage be reprinted in America;
“The Reform of the Poor Law”; and “The Impossibilities of Anarchism,” a
searching criticism of the Anarchist position by George Bernard Shaw.
Remember that the preparation of these has all been voluntary, unpaid
labor, and has involved an immense amount of toil.
In 1888 the society determined to give a course of lectures by those
of its members who were supposed to be best fitted for the purpose,
setting forth the general principles of Socialism as they understood
them. The lectures were eight in number, and were delivered to densely
packed audiences, making such an impression that it was decided to
publish them in a volume; and in the next year they appeared, under
the title of “Fabian Essays in Socialism.” As it is a case of _quorum
pars magna fui_, I am precluded from giving my estimate of a volume
in which I had a share; but I may say that this work has had a very
great sale--thirty thousand copies, the largest sale of any purely
economic work I know of excepting “Progress and Poverty,”--and that
its respectful and even cordial welcome by the English press was a
surprise. The fact shows that the public mind is being prepared for
great social changes. The ruling idea of the book is that of inevitable
political and industrial evolution,--nothing in the least degree
merely utopian, but an attempted generalization on the lines of modern
scientific ideas. The publication of this book first gave to the Fabian
Society a national instead of a merely local reputation; and I believe
the book has now been widely read in America and Germany, while it was
introduced to France by the _Revue Socialiste_. Several courses of
lectures have since been given by the society, but none of them have
been afterwards published.
The third phase of the society’s activity is, as I have said, in
practical politics. This was not undertaken without some misgivings.
On the principle that you cannot touch pitch without being defiled, I
confess I doubted whether, until the people had been far more educated
in these ideas, it was wise to enter the somewhat dirty political
arena. But the intense desire to be _doing_ something, to translate
ideas into facts, to organize the people, to help in shaping the
actual progressive movement in England, and above all, perhaps, to
weaken and destroy the individualist wing of the Liberal party,--these
and other motives acted with cumulative force, especially as members
of the society began to find that they had acquired influence over
little groups of workmen here and there. There were great dangers and
difficulties. There was the danger of falling into mere wire-pulling
and making of political “deals,”--a subject about which people in
America know so much that it is not necessary to enlarge upon it; and
then there was the practical difficulty of differences of opinion in
the society, which might cause wreck if political action were indulged
in. I may say at once that these difficulties remain and will continue
to do so, though they have not led to disruption yet. There are
inveterate wire-pullers in the society, and there are those who favor
an independent labor party, those who want to permeate the Radicals and
gradually gain them over; and there are even a few who, as between the
two parties, prefer Tories to Radicals. The first political chance for
the Fabian Society came at the London county council election in 1889,
when the advanced party in London paid the society the compliment of
appropriating its entire pamphlet, “The London Programme,” and making
of it the Progressive platform of the campaign. The Progressives
carried that election, and they carried it on “The London Programme.”
Still more striking was the Progressive victory in 1892, when the
Moderate or Conservative party was almost annihilated at the polls.
The Fabian Society has supplied London with its programme of reforms;
and the reforms were in the direction of what it is now the fashion
to call municipal Socialism. At the second county council election,
several Fabians were candidates, and four of them were actually
elected; while a fifth, Ben Tillett, the labor leader, was afterwards
made an alderman. Three members of the society proved formidable though
unsuccessful candidates at the Parliamentary election two years ago.
A considerable number of members are on local municipal councils and
school boards, and another fought a very remarkable Parliamentary fight
during the last year. So it is clear that the society is largely _en
evidence_.
As to the general programme of work in which the members are supposed
more or less to take part, I may quote from the printed advice given
to members as to what they can do. First of all, “the need of study”
is insisted on. It is assumed that the member will read all the
society’s publications; and his next duty, it is urged, should be to
read the criticisms on the other side, after the manner of Cicero, who
was always careful to get up his opponent’s case. If a member cannot
read or study alone, he is recommended to set on foot a local reading
circle, and apply to the secretary for literature for the circle.
No public work should be done until this self-education has been
accomplished, and the member is really able to speak with authority
and to deal effectively with an opponent. The opponents of Socialism
in England are usually persons sent out by a body called the Liberty
and Property Defence League, of which the American millionnaire,
Mr. Astor, now a London Tory newspaper proprietor, is a member.
These persons have, as a rule, a remarkable capacity for making
fools of themselves; nevertheless, it is always a tactical blunder
to underestimate the ability of your opponent, and Fabian lecturers
are advised to assume that these Liberty and Property defenders are
acquainted with economics, even though there is good reason to suspect
they are not. There is nothing that kills like ridicule; to gibbet an
ignorant and presumptuous debater, and make him look like a fool before
a large audience, is a source of pleasure to every rightly constituted
mind. Members of the society are also urged to correspond with their
Parliamentary or municipal representative on all vital points, to worry
his life out of him if he is obstinate or wrong-headed or dishonest,
and to make him yearn like the poet for a lodge in some vast wilderness
where he might never receive another letter or vote of censure as long
as he lived. This is a good way to combat what Walt Whitman calls “the
never-ending audacity of elected persons.” The member should always
attend the local caucus meeting, and do what he can there; and if he
has the time to spare, he should be a candidate for any public post,
such as member of Parliament, of county or municipal council, of
school board, guardian of the poor, or member of the parish council
yet to be constituted. The great difficulty in the way of this is that
these public persons are not paid in England, and few of the busy and
impecunious members of the Fabian Society can afford the time for these
things.
Having thus described the constitution, work, and general character
of the Fabian Society, let me speak on the general intellectual
forces which have been operating in England to bring about this new
political growth among active young men; for it is quite new. My first
acquaintance with anything that could properly be called Socialism
in England was in London in 1879, when I went one evening to hear a
young Jewish gentleman, since deceased, Mr. Montefiore, read a paper
on German Socialism, before the London Dialectical Society. Mr.
Montefiore had but a slender knowledge of his subject, and we had to
wait for speeches by a German friend of Marx, resident in London, and
from a young, dreamy-looking man with long, thick, tousled hair, whom
I learned was Mr. Ernest Belfort Bax, since better known as a prolific
writer on Socialism from the revolutionary, Marxite point of view. At
that time there was not a single young man in London interested in or
in favor of anything like Socialism, excepting Mr. Bax. Now there are
hundreds. What are the reasons for the change?
(1) The exhaustion of the older Liberalism and the obviously
unsatisfactory character of mere republicanism. And here American
readers must permit me to be plain by saying that the United States
seemed to furnish an object lesson to the world as to the failure of
mere republicanism to solve a single one of our social questions. A
quarter of a century ago the American Republic was the guiding star of
advanced English political thought. It is not so now: candor compels
me to say that. It is not merely a question of machine politics, of
political corruption, of the omnipotent party boss; though supine
Americans who do nothing to overthrow those purely political evils
should be reminded that Europe as well as America is involved in
and has to pay for their cowardice and indifference. But over and
beyond this is the great fact of the division between rich and poor,
millionnaires at one end, tramps at the other, a growth of monopolies
unparalleled, crises producing abject poverty just as in Europe. These
facts proved to men clearly that new institutions were of no use along
with the old forms of property; that a mere theoretic democracy,
unaccompanied by any social changes, was a delusion and a snare. The
result of this is that the old enthusiasm for mere republicanism has
died away, and that, though twenty-five years ago there was a good
sprinkling of republican clubs in England, there is not a single one of
them left now.
(2) The second cause I take to be a new spirit in literature. The
genteel, the conventional, the thinner kind of romantic literature
began to die out; and the powerful realistic school began to attract
men’s minds. There was a desire to know things as they are, to sound
the plummet in the sea of social misery, to have done with make-believe
and get at realities. The Russian writers, with their intense
Socialistic feeling, attracted great numbers of readers, who seemed to
find in them something entirely new and immensely powerful. I should
name among individual writers who have powerfully aided the growth, I
do not say of Socialism itself, but of the feeling in the soil of which
Socialism is easily developed, Dickens, Victor Hugo, Carlyle, Whitman,
Ruskin, Tolstoi, Zola and Arnold. A curious and medley list, you may
say, and so it is; but I am certain that each of these great writers
has contributed a distinct element to the expansion and liberation of
the minds that have been formed, say, during the last twenty years. For
among all these writers, varied as they are, it is the social feeling
which is the most powerful impulse.
(3) Along with the new literature has grown a new art feeling, an
intense hatred of the smug and respectable, and a love to be surrounded
by attractive objects. Ruskin, Morris, and Walter Crane have shown
why it is that the true artist is at war with commercialism, with
the notion that things are to be produced for a profit, no matter
what abominations you may turn out. The conception that no person
has any right to inflict an ugly object of any sort on the world,
especially for the sake of making gain out of it, has taken hold on the
imaginative mind of the younger people of our cultivated classes.
(4) In the fourth place, the old political economy is absolutely dead
in England, although you might not perhaps guess it from some of the
English economic writers. The influence of German thought in this,
as in other departments, has affected men’s minds. Take a series of
books like the Social Science Series, published by Sonnenschein;
half those books are Socialistic,--and that would have been an
impossibility twenty years ago. Of the “Fabian Essays in Socialism,”
it may be said that the publisher, as well as the Society, reaped
large profits from it. I mention such works as these, rather than
romances like Morris’s “News from Nowhere,” or Bellamy’s “Looking
Backward.” The charm of Morris’s style and the ingenuity of Bellamy’s
narrative would be sufficient to account for their success; but the
popularity of these other works represents a body of serious interest
in advanced economics, which may well be considered startling when the
old hidebound prejudices of orthodox English economics are taken into
consideration.
(5) _Laissez-faire_ individualist political philosophy is dead. In
vain does poor Mr. Herbert Spencer endeavor to stem the torrent. His
political ideas are already as antiquated as Noah’s ark. I do not know
a single one of the younger men in England who is influenced by them
in the slightest degree, though one hears of one occasionally, just
as one hears of a freak in a dime museum. For all practical purposes,
philosophic Radicalism, as it was called, is as extinct as the dodo.
(6) There is another cause which cannot be ignored, though I speak upon
it with some hesitation, as I purposely avoid, as far as possible, the
difficult questions of religion and the deeper ethics. I mean that
the old dualism, with its creed of other-worldliness, has gone by the
board. Whatever men’s theoretical views are upon many transcendental
matters, there is a general feeling now that the world is one, and
that actual life here is just as sacred, normal, good, as it ever was
or ever will be in any hypothetical past or future; that if there is
any heaven for us we have to make it, and that such heaven is a state
of the mind, of human relationships, and not a place to be reached at
a definite period of time. Perhaps I may quote the eloquent words of
William Morris in his “Dream of John Ball”: “Fellowship is heaven, and
the lack of fellowship is hell.” This idea is, I say, a powerful factor
in leading the minds of the younger men to the views of which I am
speaking. But men are not altogether influenced by their theoretical
or even spiritual ideas; they are also moved, and so long as they have
material bodies to be fed and clothed they will continue to be moved,
by purely self-regarding and economic considerations. Let us never be
deluded into supposing that altruistic feelings alone will induce men
to make great social changes; egotistic considerations will prompt them
as well, the desire of self-preservation working along with the desire
for a better and more harmonious social order than exists. It is not
only upon the working classes that capitalist monopoly tells; it tells
also upon the educated middle classes who are not in the monopoly. They
find the avenues of livelihood and preferment one after another closed
to them; and just as education spreads, this will become more and more
the case. When a small number of persons in a large community are
highly educated, they have what economists call a monopoly value; they
can get a good price for their services, because they possess something
which few people have. Spread this higher education and the monopoly
is broken down. Now, this is roughly what is going on in society;
democracy is levelling all up to a common level, however gradual may be
the process; and consequently highly educated men with their special
gifts find their rates of remuneration becoming lower and lower, unless
they possess some rare gift of genius, as a Sara Bernhardt in acting,
a Paderewski in playing, a Stevenson in story-telling, a Mascagni as
a composer. These rare people still command their monopoly value; but
for the rest it has disappeared. Thus even more than the workingmen,
perhaps, it has been the educated young men of the middle class
(and the young women, too) who have been hardest hit by the modern
development. Fifty years ago you could have gathered all the press
writers of London into a single moderate-sized room. To-day all told
they number nearly ten thousand. Everybody with a pen, ink and paper
and any capacity for turning out “copy” is a journalist; and you see
at once that it is impossible for all these men to earn a living. They
don’t, and can’t. There are scores of highly educated people who work
every day in the British Museum for eight or nine hours a day and earn
less than a mechanic in constant occupation. It is the same in all the
professions. Only fifteen per cent of London advocates ever get briefs
at all; the other eighty-five per cent get nothing. In the medical
profession it is the same. The prizes go to about five per cent of the
profession; as for the average medical man in the London suburbs, the
rates are so cut that I am credibly informed by one of them who studied
at Cambridge and Heidelberg, and on whose education hundreds of pounds
were spent, the fee for attendance and prescription in his suburban
district has been brought down to twenty-five cents. It will be seen
that it is not a question of making money or of the disgusting progress
towards smug respectability, which is known as “getting on,”--it is
positively a question of a bare living. Now, while a workingman who has
never known comfort, whose father has never known it before him, can
often stand a frightful amount of poverty without getting desperate,
the well-bred young man cannot; and the result is that the keenest and
most dangerous discontent comes from the educated classes, who are
leading the Socialist masses all over Europe. Some superficial people
think the remedy is to be found in inducing young men of the better
classes to abandon the so-called “respectable” occupations and go in
for manual labor. Let them cease, by all means, to be “respectable,”
but let not any one lay the flattering unction to his soul that this,
under existing economic conditions, is any solution. For what is the
difficulty about manual labor now? Why, that thousands of those already
engaged in it are not wanted; it is the difficulty of the unemployed,
the difficulty of over-production. In 1886, according to the Report
of the Washington Bureau of Statistics, there were at least one and
one-half million of unemployed men in the United States; and this state
of things has been almost if not quite paralleled in 1893. In London
lack of employment is chronic, and is growing to such huge proportions
that our cowardly, blind, public men dare not grapple with it. In
Australia the unemployed have been walking the streets of Melbourne by
the thousand. How absurd then it is to propose to add to the numbers of
workingmen when those already in the ranks cannot find means of living!
There is one method, alas, open to men, as there is always one method
open to tempted, poverty-stricken women,--the method of what I may call
intellectual prostitution; and many there be that go in at that gate.
Sick and weary of the penury and struggle that go with honesty, young
men of ability will deliberately sell themselves to the capitalist
who has cornered our intellectual as he has cornered our material
production, and will serve him for a good living. What numbers I have
known choose this path!--and I cannot blame them, for they are forced
into it by the conditions of modern life. It is useless preaching fine
morals to them; the conditions of life must be adapted to human nature
as it is, for human nature will not, you may be quite sure, suddenly
transform itself to suit the conditions. These, then, are the economic
motives which, combined with the moral and intellectual motives to
which I have previously given expression, are forcing young men of
education and good breeding into the ranks of the Socialists, and which
especially operate in the case of a body like the Fabian Society.