Fifty Years of Fabians
By R. C. K. ENSOR
WHEN the history of European Socialism comes to be written, two, and only two, contributions of first-class importance to it will be recorded as having originated in the British Isles. One is the creation (inspired above all by Keir Hardie) of a Socialistic Labour ' Party on a basis, not of abstract dogmas, but of trade- union empiricism. The other and earlier, which did much to render Hardie's work possible, is the intel- lectual current of the Fabians.
Fifty years have now passed since Fabianism began. In January, 1884, at a meeting in connexion with the " Fellowship of the New Life " founded by Thomas Davidson, the Fabian Society was launched on its independent career. Of the " old gang," who afterwards ran the Society for so long, only two—Edward Pease and Hubert Bland—took part on this occasion. The first leader was Frank Podmore, chiefly remembered now for his work in psychical research. He it was who moved the formative resolutions and recorded them on the minutes ; he, too, who is said to have faked the ingenious and eloquent motto about Fabius, from which the Society derived its name. But in the spring of that year Sidney Webb (now Lord Passfield) and Sydney Olivier (now Lord Olivier) joined the circle, and in September Mr. Bernard Shaw was elected a member, Add William Clarke and Graham Wallas, who both joined in the first half of 1886, and you have all the men who made Fabianism famous in the 19th century.
Points to note about them are that they were all middle-class and all very young—the movement had no patriarchs. The year 1884 showed many other Socialist stirrings ; Hyndman's Democratic Federa- tion prefixed " Social " to its title ; William Morris spent a meteoric year in it before founding his Socialist League ; there were doings with the London Trades Council, and an orgy of open-air propaganda. The tiny body of Fabians who met in each other's rooms must have seemed by comparison negligible. So they would have been, had they not happened to comprise several individuals of genius and several others of outstanding ability. But little of this had yet declared itself, and nobody saw the haloes of future renown hanging over the young men's heads.
When they came to think out a distinctive policy, one of their starting-points was the lesson of the Paris Commune in 1871. The French Socialists had failed— why ? Not because they had missed power, but because, when they had seized it, they did not know what to do with it. Hyndman, Morris, and the rest had overlooked this ; and even if they ever pushed their vessels from land, they would be shipwrecked on the same rock. The Fabians, therefore, 13:ftt .ftto inquire, how, in fact, it might be possible to bring Socialism about in Great Britain ; and they had not long done so before they discovered what Sidney Webb nearly forty years later (in 1923) called the " inevitability of gradualness." Destructive revolutions may be achieved, so to say, in a day ; but the constructive transformation of an immense and impersonal economic system could only proceed by cumulative instalments.
Next they discovered that the process had already started ; in this direction and that, whether by State or municipal action, it was already taking place under their eyes, irrespectively of whether Conservatives or Liberals were in power. Thus they abandoned for the time the idea of a Socialist party, and concentrated instead on thinking out and popularizing steps hi Socialist evolution, which existing parties might be induced to take. This was the famous policy of " per- meation." Unfriendly observers likened it to the tactics of the Jesuits. A closer comparison was to the role of Bentham, creating not a party but a school of thought, and persuading statesmen to re-cast existing institutions in the light of new principles. Fabian Essays, published in 1889, is the expression of this idea, and as such repre- sented the most important new turning in Socialist thought since Marx and Engels issued their Communist Manifesto 41 years before. For the rest of the century politicians, trade unionists, co-operators, and religious bodies were all industriously " permeated " ; and the foundation of Keir Hardie's I.L.P. in 1893 and of the L.R.C. (later the Labour Party) in 1900 both owed much to Fabian propaganda.
When the democratic revival set in, which culminated in the Liberal and Labour victory of 1906, the Fabian Society " missed the 'bus." It had earned the distrust of Radicals and Labour men alike by supporting the Boer War and the Balfour Education Act, and still more perhaps by belated attempts to revive the now impossible Lord Rosebery. Some of its best members had left it on these issues—notably Graham Wallas and Ramsay MacDonald. Nevertheless, the 1906 tide sent up its numbers to embarrassing heights, and soon precipitated a conflict between the new blood and the " old gang." This was where Mr. H. G. Wells's celebrated intervention came in. He was not treated too fairly in open debate by some of those whom he assailed ; but his eventual failure was not due to that (for he secured election to the Executive with plenty of support), but to the extreme and inexplicable incapacity which he then showed for committee work—a sphere .in which the " old gang " were past-masters.
Yet the post-1906 period was an epoch of boom in the Society, particularly for clever young people. The Fabian Nursery in London and the very large university Fabian societies which developed at Oxford and Cam- bridge were a great feature ; and would have borne even more fruit than they have, had not so many of their best products been killed in the War. Then, too, started the Fabian Summer School—first in the field, I think, of all political summer schools. The last great Fabian " push " was from 1910 to 1912 ; when Mrs. Sidney Webb, who hitherto had rather left the Society to her husband's care, suddenly invaded its arena with all-pervading energy, and swept the members into her campaign for abolishing the Poor Law. About this time the Society started its public courses of ticket lectures held in one or other of the big halls of central London—an institution which flour- ishes down to the present day and is perhaps the only one which still brings the Society to the notice of large num- bers of educated people. As long as Mr. Bernard Shaw survives to rally them, they will come. But what then ? Who can say ?
Organizations have their dates and ends like indi- viduals. This is one which, not at a single period but at several, played a great part in shaping people's minds. All sorts of eminent persons have been through it in their time, besides obvious Socialist leaders or writers—anti- Socialists like Mr. Harold Cox, leading Conservatives like Mr. Amery and Mr. Walter Elliot, great preachers like Canon R. J. Campbell, and many eminent civil ser- vants who shall be nameless. It is impossible to say how much it did to bring about the Collectivist tendencies in British legislation and administration,• which mark the past sixty years as clearly as Individualism marked the previous sixty. These things began before it, and it is arguable that they would have operated as fully, though not as consciously, without it ; but it certainly did a great deal towards supplying the forces which stirred society with practicable ideas in place of blind insurgence. This last work it has continued to do since the War, when many of its members have sat in the Parliamentary Labour Party, or on the Treasury Bench as Labour Ministers. Yet the old all-round permeation .policy had advantages, which attachment to one party has for- feited. It was possibly a mistake when the Society affiliated to the Labour Party originally ; for tho I.L.P. could then do that sort of work far better, and quite sufficiently. It was more certainly a mistake when much later the Basis was altered, so as to compel every new member to acknowledge Labour Party allegiance: Thought is free, and when party puts a seal on the door of a thinking-shop, originality is apt to fly out at the window. Nor does any party want a society to do its thinking for it ; they prefer (and the Labour Party has been no exception) to run research bureaux and inquiry committees and publications of their own. This is why the Fabian Society, while it still, goes on, wears now the aspect of a stranded vessel, past which the main tides of political interest have flowed.
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