The History of the Fabian Society

s of Fabia

an ideas-Positivism-Henry George-John Stuart Mill-Robert Owen-Karl Mar

ciety or the government: there is no disaffection anywhere, the Treasury is fairly full, the accumulations of capital are vast"; and then the writer goes on to compare Great Britain with Ire

een political parties: the Channel tunnel is no nearer completion: and then as now, when other topics

ersy which now seems incredible. Robert Louis Stevenson can no longer be adequately described as an "accomplished writer," and the introduction of female clerks into th

arently but little discussion, had passed a resolution asking the Government to institute an enquiry with a view to relaxing the stringency of Poor Law administration. This, said the "Spect

ing of 1882 on "the ever-increasing wonder" of that strange faith, "Positivism." It is difficult for the present generation to realise how large a space

s be measured by the effects of his work on the thought of the world. The "Spectator" printed a secondary article which showed some appreciation of the event. But in the monthly reviews it passed practically unnoticed. It is true

and Lady Verney's "Peasant Proprietorship in France" ("Contemporary," January, 1882), Mr. John Rae's "Co-operative Agriculture in Germany" ("Contemporary," March, 1882), and Pr

arried Women in Factories," Professor Stanley Jevons ("Contemporary," January, 1882) proposes that mothers of children under three years of age shoul

y free from Communism and Nihilism and similar destructive movements, but who can tell how long this will continue? We have a festering mass of human wretchedness in all our great towns, which is the natural hotbed of such anarchical movements: all the great cont

Progress of Socialism." "On the Continent," he wrote, "Socialism is said to be everywhere." To it he attributed with remarkable inaccuracy, the agrarian movement in Ireland, and with it he connected the fact that Henry George's new book, "Progress and

n accepted State function. Lord Beaconsfield was dead and he had forgotten his zeal for social justice long before he attained power. Gladstone, then in the zenith of his fame, never took any real interest in social questions as we now understand them. Lord Salisbury was an aristocrat and thought as an aristocrat. John Bright viewed industrial life from the standpoint of a L

outh, saw its cruelties and its absurdities and judged them, not as older men, by comparison with the worse cruelties and greater absurdities of earlier days,

n's hypothesis. The young men of the time I am describing grew up with the new ideas and accepted them as a matter of course. Herbert Spencer, then deemed the greatest of English thinkers, was pointing out in portentous phraseology the enormous significance of Evolution. Professor Huxley, in brilliant essays, was turning to ridicule the simple-minded credulity of Gladstone and his contemporaries. Our parents, who read neither Spencer nor Huxley, lived in an intellectual world which bore no relation to our own; and c

em some of the ablest thinkers of the day. The "Religion of Humanity" offered solutions for all the problems that faced us. It suggested a new heaven, of a sort, and it proposed a new earth, free from all the inequalities of wealth, the preventable suffering, the reckless waste of effort, which we saw around us.

gh. Here was a man who challenged the existing order of society and pronounced it wrong. It was in his view based on conventions, on superstitions, on regulations which were all out of date; society should be reorganised in the light of pure reason;

nineteen centuries had in vain preached social obligation to the rich. The new creed could not succeed where the old, with all its

ialism hardly existed at that time in English-speaking countries, but the early advocates of land taxation were not then, as they usually are now, uncompromising individualists. "Progress and Poverty" gave an extraordinary impetus to the political thought of the time. It proposed to redress the wrongs suffered by the working classes as a whole: the poverty it considered was the poverty of the wage workers as a class, not the destitution of the unfortunate and downtrodden individuals. It did not merely propose, like philanthropy and the Poor Law, to relieve the acute suffering of the outcasts of civilisation, those condemned to wretchedness by t

wrote in a land where the people ruled themselves, not only in fact but also in name. The United States in the seventies was not yet dominated by trusts and controlled by millionaires. Indeed even now that domination and control, dangerous and disastrous as it often is, could not withstand for a moment any widespread uprising of the popular will. Anyway, George recognised th

d Lombard Street, on the floor of the Stock Exchange, and in the Bank of England, land appears to bear no relation at all to wealth, and the allegation that the whole surplus of production goes automatically to the landowners is obviously untrue.

sufferings and injustices, if the institution of private property necessarily carried with it as a consequence that the produce of labour should be apportioned as we now see it almost in inverse proportion to labour, the largest portions to those who have never worked at all, the next largest to those whose work is almost nominal, and so in descending scale, the remuneration dwindling as the work grows harder and more disagreeable until the most fatiguing and exhaust

of operations was now clearly seen to be confined within narrow limits. Profit-sharing then as now was a sickly plant barely kept alive by the laborious efforts of benevolent professors. Mill's indictment of the capitalist system, in regard to its effects on social life, was so powerful, his treatment of the primit

sense of art; his innumerable writings are unreadable; and both his later excursions into spiritualism, and the failure of his communities and co-operative enterprises, had clouded his reputation amongst those outside the range of his pers

is true that Marx had taken a prominent part in founding the International at that historic meeting in St. Martin's Town Hall on September 28th, 1864. The rea

dman's "England for All," published in 1881, which was the first presentation of his ideas in English, did not even mention his name. This book was in fact an extremely moderate proposal to remedy "something seriously amiss in the conditions of our everyday life," and the immediate programme was no more than an eight hours working day, free and compulsory education, compulsory construction of working-class dwellings, and cheap "transport" for working-class passengers. It was the unauthorised programme of the Democratic Federation which had been founded by Mr. Hyndma

England," which for some time was the text-book of the Democratic Federation, b

Kapital" is dated 8th October, 1883; but I do not think that any of the original Fabi

le boldly claims the name of Socialist, as used by Maurice and Kingsley: the July number contains a long article by Henry George. In September a formal report is given of the work of the Democratic Federation. In November Christianity and Socialism are said to be convertible terms, and in January, 1884, the clerical view of usury is set forth in an article on the morality of interest. In March Mr. H.H. Champion explains "surplus value," and in April we find a sympathetic review of the "Historic Basis of Socialism." In April, 1885, appears a long and full report of a lecture by Bernard Shaw to the Liberal and Social Union. The

ght be led. Probably his Scotch common sense recoiled from definitely taking the plunge: I am not aware that he ever actually proposed that his disciples should form a self-contained community. In a lecture to the New York Fellowship of the New Life, he said, "I shall set out with two assumptions, first, that human life does not consist in material possession; and second, that it does consist in free spiritual activity, of which in th

have not included the writings of Ruskin, Socialist in outlook as some of them undoubtedly are, because I think that the value of his social teachings was concealed from most of us at that time by reacti

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eable at that period, e.g. the "Manifesto of the Comm

conomy," Book II

l his conversion to Socialism. See J

83, monthly, 1d.; c

," till 1895. Member of the English Land Restoration League, originally the Land Reform Union,

a brilliant career at Aberdeen University he settled in America, but travelled much in Europe. His magnetic personality inspired attachment and admiration in all he came across. He lectured and w

raph by Fredk

DMORE, A