Fabian Tract No. 41. 


THE FABIAN SOCIETY : 


ITS EARLY HISTORY. 

By G. B ERNARD S HAW. 

A iPAPER READ AT A COXFERE:\CE OF THE L ONDON AND 
PRoviNCIAL FABIAN Soc iETIES AT EssEx H ALL oN 
THE 6TH FEBRUARY, 1892, 
A:\D ORDFRED TO BE PRI:-.ITED FOR THE 1:-.IFORMATI0:-.1 OF ~JDIBERS. 


PRICE ONE PENNY. 

LONDON: 

PuBLISHED BY THE FABIA:'\ SociETY, 276 STRAXD, vV.C. 

REPRI :-.IT ED XOVE~IBER 1899. 


THE FABIAN SOCIETY,{, 

What it has done; 
and 
How it has done it. 


;.wF any delegate present thinks that the Fabian Society was wise J from the hour of its birth, let him forthwith renounce that error. 
-The Fabian wisdom, such as it is, has grown out of the Fabian 
experience; and our distinction, if we may claim any, lies more in 
our capacity for profiting by experience (a rarer faculty in politics 
than you might suppose) than in any natural superiority on our part 
to the follies of incipient Socialism. In 1883 we were content with 
nothing less than the prompt'' reconstruction of society in accordance 
with the highest moral possibilities." In 1884 we were discussing 
whether money should be permitted under Socialism, or whether 
labor notes would not be a more becoming currency for us ; and I 
myself actually debated the point with a Fabian who had elaborated 
a pass-book system to supersede both methods. Then we were joined 
by Mrs. Wilson, now one of the chief members of the Freedom Group 
of Kropotkinist Anarchists ; and a sort of influenza of Anarchism soon 
spread through the society. When we issued our fortunately little-
known Tract No. 4, "What Socialism Is," we divided it into two 
sections, one answering the question from the Collectivist and the 
other from the Anarchist point of view. The answer did not amount 
to much either way; for the tract contains nothing that was not 
already to be found better stated in the famous Communist Manifesto 
of Marx and Engels. 

On the Warpath. 

It must not be supposed that Anarchism encountered any resist ance 
among us on the ground of its associations with physical force 
The Fabian Society was warlike in its origin: it came into existencE 
through a schism in an earlier society for the peaceful regeneration 
of the race by the cultivation of perfection of individual character. 
Certain members of that circle, modestly feeling that the revolution 
would have to wait an unreasonably long time if postponed until 
they personally had attained perfection, set up the banner of Socialism 

* A paper by G. Bernard Shaw, read at a Conference of the London and 
Provincial Fabian Societies at Essex Hall on the 6th February, 1892, and ordered 
to be printed for the information of members. 

militant; seceded from the Regenerators; and established themselves 
independently as the Fabian Society. That was how the Fabian 
began; and although exactly the same practical vein which had led 
its founders to insist on an active policy afterwards made them the 
most resolute opponents of Insurrectionism, the Constitutionalism 
which now distinguishes us was as unheard-of at the Fabian meetingsin 1884 and 1885 as at the demonstrations of the Social-Democratic 
Federation or the Socialist League. For example, in 1885, a conflict 
with the Government arose over the right of free speech at Dod 
Street-a conflict precisely similar to that now [February 1892] on 
hand at the World's End, Chelsea. But nobody dreamt of giving 
the Fabian delegate to the Vigilance Committee of 1885 the strict 
instructions which bind the delegates of 1892 to use all their 
influence to avert a conflict with the police. He was simply to 
throw himself into the struggle on the side of the Socialists, 
and take the consequences. In short, we were for a year or two 
just as Anarchistic as the Socialist League and just as insurrectionary 
as the Federation. It will at once be asked why, in that case, 
we did not join them instead of forming a separate society. Well, 
the apparent reason was that we were then middle-class all 
through, rank and file as well as leaders, whereas the League and 
Federation were quite proletarian in their rank and file. But whatever 
weight this sort of consideration may have had with our members 
in general, it had none with our leaders, most of whom, indeed, 
were active members of the Federation as well. It undoubtedlyprevented working-men from joining the Fabian whilst we were 
holding our meetings in one another's drawing-rooms; but it 
did not prevent any Fabian worth counting from joining the 
working-class organizations. The true cause of the separationlay deeper. Differences, which afterwards became explicit and 
definite, were latent from the first in the temperament and character 
of the Fabians. When I myself, on the point of joining the Social-
Democratic Federation, changed my mind and joined the Fabian 
instead, I was guided by no discoverable difference in program or 
principles, but solely by an instinctive feeling that the Fabian and 
not the Federation would attract the men of my own bias and 
intellectual habits who were then ripening for the work that laybefore us. 

However, as I have said, in 1885 our differences were latent or 
instinctive ; and we denounced the capitalists as thieves at the 
Industrial Remuneration Conference, and, among ourselves, talked 
revolution, anarchism, labor notes ve1·sus pass-books, and all the 
rest of it, on the tacit assumption that the object of our campaign, 
with its watchwords, "EnuCATE, AGITATE, 0RGANIZ~." was to bringabout a tremendous smash-up of existing society, to be succeeded bycomplete Socialism. And this meant that we had no true practicalunderstanding either of existing society or Socialism. Without beingquite definitely aware of this, we yet felt it to a certain extent 
all along; for it was at this period that we contracted the invaluable 
habit of freely laughing at ourselves which has alv;:ays distinguished 


5 

us, and which has saved us from becoming hampered by the gushingentlmsiasts who mistake their own emotions for public movements. 
From the first, such people fled after one glance at us, declaring that 
we were not serious. Our preference for practical suggestions and 
criticisms, and our impatience of all general expressions of sympathywith working-class aspirations, not to mention our way of chaffing 
our opponents in preference to denouncing them as enemies of 
the human race, repelled from us some warm-hearted and eloquentSocialists, to whom it seemed callous and cynical to be even 
commonly self-possessed in the presence of the sufferings upon which 
Socialists make war. But there was far too much equality and 
personal intimacy among the Fabians to allow of any member presumiug 
to get up and preach at the rest in the fashion which the 
working-classes still tolerate submissively from their leaders. We 
knew that a certain sort of oratory was useful for " stoking up"
public meetings; but we needed no stoking up, and, when any orator 
tried the process on us, soon made him understand that he was 
wasting his time and ours. I, for one, should be very sorry to lower 
the intellectual standard of the Fabian by making the atmosphereof its public discussions the least bit more congenial to stale declamation 
than it is at present. If our debates are to be kept wholesome, 
they cannot be too irreverent or too critical. And the irreverence, 
which has become traditional with us, comes down from those early 
days when we often talked such nonsense that we could not helplaughing at ourselves. 

Tory Gold at the 1885 Election. 

When I add that in 1885 we had only 40 members, you will be 
able to form a sufficient notion of the .Fabian Society in its nonage.
In that year there occurred an event which developed the latent 
differences between ourselves and the Social-Democratic Federation. 
The Federation said then, as it still says, that its policy is founded on 
a recognition of the existence of a Class War. How far the fact of 
the working classes being at war with the proprietary classes justifies 
them in suspending the observance of the ordinary social obligations 
in dealing with them was never settled ; but at that time we were 
decidedly less scrupulous than we are now in our ideas on the subject 
; and we all said freely that as gunpowder destroyed the feudal 
system, so the capitalist system could not long survive the invention 
of dynamite. Not that we were dynamitards : indeed the absurdityof the inference shows how innocent we were of any practicalacquaintance with explosives; but we thought that the statement 
about gunpowder and feudalism was historically true, and that it 
would do the capitalists good to remind them of it. Suddenly, bow-
ever, t he F ederation made a very startling practical application of 
the Class War doctrine. They did not blow anybody up ; but in the 
general election of 1885 they ran two candidates in London-Mr. 
Williams, in Hampstead, who got 27 votes, and 1\fr. Fielding, in 
Kennington, who got 32 votes. And they made no secret of the fact 


that the expenses of these elections had been paid by one of the 
established political parties in order to split the vote of the other. 
From the point of view of the abstract moralist there was nothing to 
be said against the transaction ; since it was evident that Socialist 
statesmanship must for a long time to come consist largely of takingadvantage of the party dissensions between the Unsocialists. It mayeasily happen to-morrow that the Liberal party may offer to contribute 
to the expenses of a Fabian candidate in a hopelessly Torystronghold, in order to substantiate its pretensions to encourageLabor representation. Under such circumstances it is quite possible 
that we may say to the Fabian in question, Accept by all means; and 
deliver propagandist addresses all over the place. Suppose that 
the Liberal party offers to bear part of Mr. Sidney Webb's expenses 
at the forthcoming County Council election at Deptford, as 
they undoubtedly will, by means of the usual National Liberal Club 
subscription, in the case of the poorer Labor candidates. Mr. 
Webb, as a matter of personal preference for an independence which 
he is fortunately able to afford, will refuse. But suppose 1\Ir. Webb 
were not in that fortunate position, as some Labor candidates will not 
be! It is quite certain that not the smallest odium would attach to 
the acceptance of a Liberal grant-in-aid. Now the idea that takingTory money is worse than taking Liberal money is clearly a Liberal 
party idea and not a Social-Democratic one. In 1885 there was not 
the slightest excuse for regarding the Tory party as any more hostile 
t,:-. Socialism than the Liberal party; and Mr. Hyndman's classical 
quotation, "Non olet"-" It does not smell," meaning that there 
is no difference in the flavor of Tory and Whig gold once it comes 
into the Socialist treasury, was a sufficient retort to the accusations 
of moral corruption which were levelled at him. But the Torymoney job, as it was called, was none the less a huge mistake in 
tactics. Before it took place, the Federation loomed large in the 
imagination of the public and the political parties. This is conclusively 
proved by the fact that the Tories thought that the Socialists 
could take enough votes from the Liberals to make it worth while to 
pay the expenses of two Socialist candidates in London. The dayafter the election everyone knew that the Socialists were an absolutely 
negligeable quantity there as far as voting power was concerned. 
They had presented the Tory party with 57 votes, at a cost 
of about £8 apiece. What was worse, they had shocked London 
Radicalism, to which Tory money was an utter abomination. It is 
hard to say which cut the more foolish figure, the Tories who had 
spent their money for nothing, or the Socialists who had sacrificed 

their reputation for worse than nothing.

The disaster was so obvious that there was an immediate falling 
off from the Federation, on the one hand of the sane tacticians of the 
movement, and on the other of those out-and-out Insurrectionists 
who repudiated political action altogether, and were only too glad to 
be able to point to a discreditable instance of it. Two resolutions 
were passed, one by the Socialist League and the other by the Fabian 
Society. HPre is the Fabian resolution: 


7 


" That the conduct of the Council of the Social-Democratic Federation 
in accepting money from the Tory party in payment of the election expenses 
of Socialist candidates is calculated to disgrace the Socialist movemont 
in England."-4th Dec., 1885. 

Here is the resolution of the League, characteristically non-
Fabian in tone : 

" That this meeting of London members of the Socialist League views 
with indignation the action of certain members of the Social Democratic 
Federation in trafficking with the honor of the Socialist party, and desires 
to express its sympathies with that section of the body which repudiates 
the tactics of the disreputable gang concerned in therecentproceedings."7th 
Dec., 1885. 

The Unemployed Agitation. 

From that time forward we were counted by the Federation as 
a hostile body; and we ourselves knew that we should have to :find 
our way for ourselves without looking to the other bodies for a 
trustworthy lead. You will perhaps expect to hear that the immediate 
result was the extinction of the Federation and the advance 
to the front of the Fabian with its peculiar opportunist policy. 
But this was not so. Even those members of the Federation who 
seceded from it then under the leadership of C. L. Fitzgerald and 

J. Macdonald, never thought of joining the Fabian. They formed 
in Feb. 1886 a new body called" The Socialist Union," which barelymanaged to keep breathing for two years. Still, it suited them 
better than the Fabian. The fact is, 1886 and 1887 were not 
favorable years for drawing room Socialism and scientific politics. 
They were years of great distress among the working classes-yearsfor street-corner agitators to marshal columns of hollow-cheeked men 
with red flags and banners inscribed with Scriptural texts to fashionable 
churches on Sunday, and to lead desperate deputations from 
the H olborn Board of Guardians to the Local Government Board 
office and back again, using stronger language at each official rebuff 
from pillar to post. These were the days when Mr. Champion told 
a meeting in London :B'ields that if the whole propertied class had 
but one throat he would cut it without a second thought, if by doing 
so he could redress the injustices of our social system; and when 
Mr. Hyndman was expelled from his cl~b for declaring on the 
Thames Embankment that there would be some attention paid to 
cases of starvation if a rich man were immolated on every pauper'stomb. Besides these London gatherings, there were meetings of 
the unemployed, not always unaccompanied by window-breaking, in 
Manchester, Birmingham, Leicester, Yarmouth, and many of the 
lcu·ge towns throughout the country. Matters were much the same 
in Holland and Belgium. In America the Eight Hours Movement, 
intensified by the distress of the unemployed, whd were estimated at 
a million strong in the United States, led to riots in April1886, 

culminating on the 4th May with the famous Chicago meeting where 
thiJ bomb was thrown which led to the hanging of four Anarchists. 
In London the police supervision of the meetings was sufficient to 
prevent any violence until Monda.y, 8th February 1886, when a SugarBounty meeting was held i..-: Trafalgar Square. It was swamped bya huge crowd of the unemployed. The Federation orators, who were 
present, seized the opportunity to hold a counter demonstration ; 
after which there was an adjournment to Hyde Park. Unfortunately, 
on this occasion the police, through some blunder in telephoning or 
the like, received orders to proceed, not to Pall Mall, but to The 
Mall. Accordingly, they were shivering in St. James's Park whilst 
the unemployed were passing through the street of rich men's clubs. 
The rich men crowded to the windows to see the poor men passalong; and Dives, not notlcing the absence of the police-, mocked 
Lazarus. Lazarus thereupon broke Dives's windows, and even 
looted a shop or two, besides harmlessly storming the carriage of a 
tactless lady near the Achilles statue. Hyndman, Champion, Burns 
and Williams were arrested and tried for this affair ; but there were 
one or two good men on the jury, notably a Christian Socialist 
named Crickmay; our friend Sparling was proved by himself and 
others to have used the most terrible of the phrases for which Burns 
was indicted; and what with these advantages and the unimpeachable 
gentility of two of the defendants, all four were acquitted. 
This was a great success, especially as the Mansion House Fund 
for the relief of the unemployed had gone up with a bound from 
£30,000 to £79,000 after the window breaking. The agitation 
went on more violently than ever afterwards ; and the restless 
activity of Champion, seconded by Burns's formidable oratory,
seized on every public opportunity, from the Lord Mayor'sShow to services for the poor in Westminster Abbey or St. 
Paul's, to parade the unemployed and force their claims upon the 
attention of the public. A commercial firm attempted to make a 
census of the unemployed in order to advertize themselves ; the 
Pall Mall Gazette tried also ; and matters looked very gloomy 
indeed when Champion, impatient of doing nothing but marchinghungry men about the streets and making stale speeches to them, 
offered the Federation the alternative of either empowering him to 
negotiate some scheme of relief with his aristocratic sympathizers, 
or else going to Trafalgar Square and staying theJ;e clay and nightuntil something should happen-the something being perhaps the 
best available attempt at a revolution possible under the circumstances. 
The Federation refused both alternatives; and Championwithdrew from the agitation in disgust. A long-brewing dissension 
between Burns and Hyndman also came to a head about this time; 
and the result was that the unemployed agitation was left almost 
leaderless at the moment when the unemployed themselves were 
getting most desperate. Early in the winter of 1887 the men themselves, 
under all sorts of casual leaders, or rather speechmakers, took 
to meeting constantly in Trafalgar Square, thus taking up Champion'salternative for want of anything else to do. Champion, however, 


9 

was gone ; and ttie shopkeepers began to complain that the sensational 
newspaper accounts of the meetings were frightening avva,ytheir customers and endangering the Christmas quarter's rent. On 
this the newspapers became more sensational than ever ; and thoge 
fervid orators who preserve friendly relations with the police began 
to throw in the usual occasional proposal to set London on fire 
simultaneously at the Bank, St. Paul's, the House of Commons, the 
Stock Exchange, and the Tower. This helped to keep the pot boiling 
; and at last the police cleared the unemployed out of the Square.
Immediately the whole working-class political organization of London 
rallied to the defence of the right of meeting. The affair of 1866, 
when the railings of Hyde Park were thrown down and the rightof meeting there vindicated, and the Free Speech triumph at Dod 
Street, were precedents in favor of the people. The papers which declared 
that the workers had an excellent forum in Hyde Park without 
obstructing Trafalgar Square, were reminded that in 1866 the convenience 
of Trafalgar Square for public meetings was made an excuse for 
the attempt to put down meetings in the Park. Mr. Stead, who was 
then editing the Pall Mall Gazette, and who, with all his enthusiasm, 
had about as much practical knowledge of how to do the Dod Street 
trick* as a London tram-conductor has of conducting classical 
concerts, gave the word " To the Square ! " To the Square we 
all went, therefore, with drums beating and banners waving, in 
our tens of thousands, nominally to protest against the Irish 
policy of the Government, but really to maintain the right of 
meeting in the Square. The meeting had been proclaimed ; but 
the authority cited was·an Act for the Regulation of Traffic which 
clearly gave no power to the police to prohibit processions, and 
which was abandoned by the Government when they had to justifytheir action in court. However, the new Chief Commissioner of 
Police, successor to him who had been dismissed for making that 
mistake in the previous year about Pall Mall, had no notion of sharing 
his predecessor's fate. He took no half measures in the matter: 
there was no reading of the Riot Act, or calling on the processions 
to disperse, as they had arranged to do peacefully and constitutionally 
if so ordered. It was, as one of Bunyan's pilgrims put it, but a 
word and a blow with him; for the formal summons to disperse was 

• It may be useful to say here that "the way to do the Dod Street trick" is 
simply to find a dozen or more persons who are willing to get arrested at the rate 
of one per week by speaking in defiance of the police. In a month or two, the 
repeated arrests, the crowds which they attract, the scenes which they provoke, 
the sentences passed by the magistrates and at the sessions, and the consequent 
newspaper descriptions, rouse sufficient public feeling to force the Home Secretary 
to give way whenever tho police aro clearly in the wrong. l\Ir. 1\fatthews, 
victorious in Trafalgar Square, has been completely beaten at the World's End, 
Chelsea, by this method since the above paper was read. The method, however, 
Is extremely hard on the mn.rtyr~, who suffer severely, a.ud get no compensation, 
and bub little thanks, 

accompanied by a vigorous baton charge, before which the processionists, 
though outnumbering their assailants by a hundred. to 
one, fled in the utmost confusion and terror. That eventful 13th 
November 1887 has since been known as "Bloody Sunday." The 
heroes of it were Burns and Cunninghame Graham, who charged, 
two strong, at the rampart of policemen round the Square and were 
overpowered and arrested. The heroine was l\Irs. Besant, who maybe said without the slightest exaggeration to haYe all but killed herself 
with overwork in looking after the prisoners, and organizing on 
their behalf a "Law and Liberty League" with l\Ir. Stead. Meanwhile 
the police received the blessing of l\1 r. Gladstone; and Insurrectionism, 
after a two years' innings, vanished from the field and has 
not since been much heard of. For, in the middle of the revengefulgrowling over the defeat at the Square, trade reviYed; the unemployed 
were absorbed; the Sta1· newspaper appeared to let in lightand let off steam : in short, the way was clear at last for Fabianism. 
Do not forget, though, that Insurrectionism will reappear at the 
next depression of trade as surely as the sun will rise to-morrow 
morning.* 

The Fabian Conference of r886. 

You will now ask to be told what the Fabians had been doing 
all this time. Well, I think it must be admitted that we were 
overlooked in the excitements of the unemployed agitation, which 
had, moreover, caused the Tory money affair to be forgotten. The 
Fabians were disgracefully backward in open-air speaking. Up to 
quite a recent date, Graham \\7 alias, myself, and Mrs. Besant were 
the only representative open-air speakers in the Society, whereas the 
Federation speakers, Burns, Hyndman, Andrew Hall, Tom Mann, 
Champion, Burrows, with the Socialist Leaguers, were at it constantly. 
On the whole, the Church Parades and the rest were not 
in our line; and we were not wanted by the men who were organizing 
them. Our only contribution to the agitation was a reportwhich we printed in 1886, which recommended experiments in tobacco 
culture, and even hinted at compulsory military service, as means 
of absorbing some of the unskilled unemployed, but which went carefully 
into the practical conditions of relief works. Indeed, we are at 
present trying to produce a new tract on the subject without finding 
ourselves able to improve very materially on the old one in this 
respect. It was drawn up by Bland, Hughes, Podmore, Stapelton, and 
Webb, and was the first of our publications that contained any solid 
information. Its tone, however, was moderate and its style somewhat 
conYentional; and the Society was still in so hot a temper on the 

• This is the sentence which leu a London evening ue,,·spapcr (The Echo) to 
denounce the author in unmeasured terms for inciting the unemployed to armed 
rebellion. The incident is worth mentioning as an example of t-he ordinary Press 
criticism of Socialist utterances. 

11 


social question that we refused to adopt it as a regular Fabian 
tract, and only issued it as a report printed for the information 
of members. Nevertheless we were coming to our senses 
rapidly by this time. We signalized our repudiation of 
political sectarianism in June, 1886, by inviting the Radicals, 
the Secularists, and anyone else who would come, to a greatconference, modelled upon the Industrial Remuneration Conference, 
and dealing with the Nationalization of Land and Capital.
It fully established the fact that vve had nothing immediately practical 
to impart to the Radicals and that they had nothing to impart 
to us. The proceedings were fully reported for us; but we never 
had the courage even to read the shorthand writer's report, which 
still remains in MS. Before I refreshed my memory on the 
subject the other day, I had a vague notion that the Conference cost 
a great deal of money; that it did no good whatever; that Mr. 
Bradlaugh made a speech; that l\'Irs. Fenwick Miller, who had nothing 
on earth to do with us, was in the chair during part of the 
proceedings ; and that the most successful paper was by a stran[ e 
gentleman whom we had taken on trust as a Socialist, but wLo 
turned out to be an enthusiast on the subject of building more 
harbors. I find, however, on looking up the facts, that no less than 
fifty-three societies sent delegates; that the guarantee fund for expenses 
was £100; and that the discussions were kept going for three 
afternoons and three evenings. The Federation boycotted us; but 
the Times reported us. Eighteen papers were read, two of them bymembers of Parliament, and most of the rest by well-known people. 
William 1\forris and Dr. Aveling read papers as delegates from the 
Socialist League ; the National Secular Society sent Mr. Foote 
and Mr. Robertson, the latter contributing a "Scheme of Taxation 
" in which he anticipated much of what was subsequentlyadopted as the Fabian program; Wordsworth Donisthorpe took the 
field for Anarchism of the type advocated by the authors of "A Plea 
for Liberty"; Stewart Headlam spoke for Christian Socialism and 
the Guild of St. Matthew; Dr. Pankhurst dealt with the situation 
from the earlier Radical point of view ; and various Socialist 
papers were read by Mrs. Besant, Sidney Webb, and Edward 
Carpenter, besides one by Stuart -Glennie, who subsequentlyleft us because we fought shy of the Marriage Question when 
revising our "Basis." I mention all this in order to shew you how 
much more important this abortive Conference looked than the 
present one. Yet all that can be said for it is that it made 
us known to the Radical clubs and proved that we were able to 
manage a conference in a businesslike way. It also, by the way,
shewed off our pretty prospectus with the design by Crane at the 
top, our stylish-looking blood-red invitation cards, and the other 
little smartnesses on which we then prided ourselves. We used to 
be plentifully sneered at as fops and armchair Socialists for our 
atten'oion to these details; but I think it was by no means the least of 
our merits that we always, as far as our means permitted, tried 
to make our printed documents as handsome as possible, and did 


our best to destroy the association between revolutionary literature 
and slovenly printing on paper that is nasty without being cheap. 
One effect of this was that we were supposed to be much richer 
than we really were, because we generally got better value and a 
finer show for our money than the other Socialist societies. 

The Fabian Parliamentary League. 

The Conference was the last of our follies. We had now a very 
strong Executive Committee, including 1\Irs. Besant, who in June 
1885 had effected her public profession of Socialism by joining the 
Fabian. Five out of the seven authors of "Fabian Essays," which 
were of course still unwritten, were at the helm by 1887. But by1886 we had already found that we were of one mind as to the 
advisability of setting to work by the ordinary political methods and 
having clone with Anarchism and vague exhortations to Emancipate 
the Workers. We had several hot debates on the subject with a 
section of the Socialist League which called itself Anti-State Communist, 
a name invented by Mr. Joseph Lane of that body. William 
Morris, who was really a free democrat of the Kropotkin type,
backed up Lane, and went for us tooth and nail. Records of our 
warfare may be found in the volumes of the extinct magazine called 
To-Day, which was then edited by Hubert Bland; and they are by 
no means bad reading. We soon began to see that at the debates 
the opposition to us came from members of the Socialist League, 
who were present only as visitors. The question was, how manyfollowers had our one ascertained Anarchist, l\1rs. Wilson, 
among the silent Fabians. Bla.nd and Mrs. Besant brought this 
question to an issue on the 17th September, 1886, at a meeting in 
Anderton's Hotel, by respectively seconding and moving the following 
resolution : 

"That it is advisable that Socialists should organize themselves as a 
political party for the purpose of transferring into the hands of the whole 
worlliug community full control over the soil and the means of production, 
as well as over the production and distribution of wealth." 

To this a rider was moved by William Morris as follows: 

" But whereas the first duty of Socialists is to educate the people to 
understand what their present position is, and what their future might be, 
and to keep the principle of Socialism steadily before them; and whereas 
no Parliamentary party can exist without compromise and conce.;siou, 
which would hinder that education and obscure those principles, it would 
be a false step for Socialists to attempt to tako part in the Parliameutal"y 
contest." 

I shall not attempt to describe the debate, in which -:\!orris, l\Irs. 
Wilson, Davis, and Tochatti did battle with Burns, Mrs. Besant, 
Bland, Shaw, Donald, and Rossiter: that is, with Fabian and S.D.F. 


13 


combined. Suffice it to say that the minutes of the meeting close 
with the following significant note by the secretary: 

" Subsequently to the meeting, the secretary received notice from the 
mano.ger of Anderton's Hotel that the Society could not be accommodated 
there for o.ny further meetings." 

Everybody voted, whether Fabian or not ; and Mrs. Besant and 

Bland carried their resolut'ion by 47 to 19, Morris's rider being sub


sequently rejected by 40 to 27. 
I must not linger over those high old times, tempting as they [He.

In order to avoid a breach with the Fabians who sympathized with 

Mrs. Wilson, we proceeded to form a separate body within the 

society, called the Fabian Parliamentary League, which any Fabian 

could join or not as he pleased. I am afraid I must read you at full 

length the preliminary manifesto of this body. It is dated February,

1887: 

MANIFESTO OF THE FABIAN PARLIAliiENTARY LEAGUE. 

The Fabian Parliamentary League is composed of Socialists who believe 
that Socialism mo.y be most quickly and most surely realized by utilizing 
the political power already possessed by the people. The progress of the 
Socialist party in the German Reichstag, in the Legislatures of the United 
States, and in the Paris Municipal Council, not only proves the possibility 
of a Socialist party in Parliament, but renders it imperative on English 
Socialists to set energetically about the duty of giving effect in public affairs 
to the growing influence of Socialist opinion in this country. 

The League will endeavor to organize Socialist opinion, and to bring it 
to bear upon Parliament, municipalities, and other representative bodies; 
it will, by lectures and publications, seek to deal with the political qnestions 
of the day, analysing the ultimate tendencies of measures as well as their 
immediate effects, and working for or against proposed measures of social 
reform according as they tend towards, or away from, the Socialist ideal. 

The League will take active part in all general and local elections. 
Until a fitting opportunity arises for putting forward Socialist candidates to 
form the nucleus of a Socialist party in Parliament, it will confine itself 
to supporting those candidates who will go furthest in the direction of 
Socialism. It will not ally itself absolutely with any political party; it will 
jealously avoid being made use of for party purposes; and it will be guided 
in its action by the character, record, and pledges of the co.ndidates before 
the constituencies. In Ilfunicipal, School Board, Vestry, and other local 
elections, the League will, as it finds itself strong enough, run candidates 
of its own, and by placing trustworthy Socialists on local r~nresentative 
bodies it will endeavor to secure the recognition of the Socio.!.oo principle in 
all the details of local government. 

It will be the duty of members of the League, in every bol"<mgh, to take 
active part in the public work of their districts; and to this end they 
should organize themselves into a Branch of the League. They should 
appoint a secretary to keep lists of all annual and other elections in his dis



14 

trict and of all candidates; to attend to the registration of Socialists; to 
watch the public conduct of all officials, and keep a record thereof for 
guidance at future elections; to enlist volunteers for special work, and 
generally to act as a centre of the organization. Individual members 
should write to their Parliamentary representatives on any Bill on which 
the League takes action; should take every opportunity of defending and 
advocating Socialism in their local press; should visit the workhouses 
of their neighborhood; and should exerci, e a careful supervision of local 
funds. By steady work on these and similar lines, Socialists will increase 
their power in the community, and will before long be able to influence 
effectively the course of public opinion. 

Socialists willing to co-operate should communicate with J . Brailsford 
Bright, hon. sec. of the Fabian Parliamentary League, 34 Bouverie Street, 
Fleet Street, E.C., who will give full details as to the method of organizing 
a Branch of whe League. 

THE CouNCIL OF THE 

Febmary, 1887. 
FABIAN PARLIAMENTARY LEAGUE. 

RULES OF THE LEAGUE. 

1. That the name of the Society be The Fabian Parliamentary League. 
2. That the minimum subscription be 2s. 6d. per annum. 
3. 
That at the annual general meeting the Society shall elect a Council, 
which shall hold office for one year, tho secretary or secretaries, and 
the treasurer being appointed at the same meeting. 
4. That each Branch shall appoint a member to serve on the Council. 
5. 
That meetings of the members of the League shall be held at least once 
in every three months, and on such other occasions as the Council 
shall think necessary. 
Here you have the :first sketch of the Fabian policy of to-day. 
The Parliamentary League, however, was a short-lived affair. Mrs. 
Wilson's followers faded away, either by getting converted or leaving 
us. Indeed, it is a question with us to this day whether they did not 
owe their existence solely to our own imaginations. Anyhow, it soon 
became plain that the Society was solidly with the Executive on the 
subject of political action, and that there was no need for any separate 
organization at all. The League :first faded into a Political Committee 
of the Society, and then merged silently and painlessly into 
the general body. During its separate existence it issued two 
tracts, a criticism of seven Bills then before Parliament, and 
"The True Radical Programme," which still surviYes in an 
up-to-nate form as our Tract No. 11, "The Workers' Political Program." 
One other point about the League must be noted. Mrs. 
Besant tried to form provincial branches of it; and some such 
branches did draw breath for a moment here and there in the 
country. I have not the least idea what became of them, nor is any 
one present, I venture to say, wiser than I in the matter. This 
failure was not to be wondered at; for outside Socialist circles 


l[J 

in London the Society remained unknown. It was still U1mble 
to bring up its roll of members to a hundred names; and its 
funds were so modest that nobody ever thought oi proposing that we 
should keep a banking account or rent an office. In fact, we were 
literally passing rich on £40 a year. There may be among the delegates 
of the younger Societies represented here, one or two who 
stand in some awe of the London Society. It may do them good to 
know that the Birmingham Fabian Society, on the very first dayof its existence, was more numerous and more prosperous pecuniarily 
than the London Society was until quite the other day; and 
I daresay the same is true of other provincial Fabian bodies. If ever 
there was a Society which lived by its wits, and by its wits alone, 
that Society was the Fabian. 

Socialism "Equipped with All the Culture 
of the Age." 

By far our most important work at this period was our renewal 
of that historic and economic equipment of Social-Democracyof which Ferdinand Lassalle boasted, and which had been gettingrustier and more obsolete ever since his time and that of his contemporary 
Karl Marx. In the earlier half of this century, when 
these two leaders were educated, all the Socialists in Europe were 
pouncing on Ricardo's demonstration of the tendency of wages to fall 
to bare subsistence, and on his labor theory of value, believing that 
they constituted a scientific foundation for Socialism ; and the 
truth is that since that bygone time no Socialist (unless we 
count Ruskin) had done twopennyworth of economic thinking, or 
made any attempt to keep us up to date in the scientific world. In 
1885 we used to prate about Marx's theory of value and Lassalle's 
Iron Law of Wages as if it were still1870. In spite of Henry George, 
no Socialist seemed to have any working knowledge of the theory of 
economic rent: its application to skilled labor was so unheard-of 
that the expression "rent of ability" was received with laughterwhen the Fabians first introduced it into their lectures and discussions; 
and as for the modern theory of value, it was scouted as a 
blasphemy against Marx, with regard to whom the Social-Democratic 
Federation still maintains a Dogma of Finality and Infallibilitywhich has effectually prevented it from making a single contribution 
to the economics of Socialism since its foundation. As to 
history, we had a convenient stock of imposing generalizations about 
the evolution from slavery to serfdom and from serfdom to free wage 
labor. We drew our pictures of society with one broad line dividing 
the bourgeoisie from the proletariat, and declared that there were 
only two classes really in the country. We gave lightning sketches 
of the development of the medicYal craftsman into the manufacturer 
and finally into the factory hand. We ilenounced Malthusianism 
quite as crudely as the 1falthusians advocated it, which is saying a 
good deal; and we raged against emigration, National Insurance, 


Co-operation, Trade-Unionism, old-fashioned Radicalism, and eYerything 
else that was not Socialism; and that, too, without knowing ctt 
all clearly what we meant by Socialism. The mischief was, not tlHtt 
our generalizations were unsound, but that we had no cletailed 
knowledge of the content of them: we had borrowed them ready-
made as articles of faith; and when opponents like Charles Bradln.ugh 
asked u.s for details 'Ye sneered at the demand without being in the 
least able to comply with it. The real reason "-hy Anarchist and 
Socialist worked then shoulder to shoulder as comrades and brothers 
w:ts that neither one nor the other had any definite idea of what he 
wanted or how it was to be got. All this is true to this day of the 
raw recruits of the movement, and of some older hands who may be 
absolved on the ground of invincible ignorance; but it is no longer 
true of the leaders of the movement in general. In 1887 even the 
British Association burst out laughing as one man when an elderlyrepresentative of Philosophic Radicalism, with the air of one who was 
uttering the safest of platitudes, accused us of ignorance of political 
economy ; and now not even a Philosophic Radical is to be found 
to make himself ridiculous in this way. The exemplary eye-openingof Mr. Leonard Courtney by Mr. Sidney Webb lately in the lead· 
ing English economic review surprised nobody, except perhaps Mr. 
Courtney himself. The cotton lords of the north would never 
dream to-day of engaging an economist to confute us with learned 
pamphlets as their predecessors engaged Nassau Senior in the daysof the Ten Hours Bill, because they know that we should be only 
too glad to advertize our Eight Hours Bill by flattening out any such 
champion. From 1887 to 1889 we were the recognized bullies and 
swashbucklers of advanced economics. 

How to Train for Public Life. 

Now this, as you may imagine, was not done without study; and as 
that study could not possibly be carried on by the men who were organizing 
the unemployed agitation in the streets, the Fabians had a 
monopoly of it. We had to study where we could and how we could. 
I need not repeat the story of the llampstead Historic Club, founded 
by a handful of us to read Marx and Proudhon, and afterwards 
turned into a systematic history class in which each student took 
his turn at being professor. My own experience may be taken as 
typical. For some years I attended the Hampstead Historic Club 
once a fortnight, and spent a night in the alternate weeks at a privatecircle of economists which has since blossomed into the British 
Econon:ic Association-a cirde where the social question was left 
out, and the work kept on abstract scientific lines. I made all myacquaintances think me madder than usual by the pertinacity 'Yith 
which I attended debating societies and haunted all sorts of hole· 
and-corner debates and public meetings and made speeches at them. 
I \Yas President of tbe Local GoYernment Board at an amateur 
Pil.J li::unent where a Fauian ministry had to put its proposals into 
black-aucl-'.\hile in the shape of Parliamentary Bills. EYery Sunday 


17 


I lectnrecl on some subject which I wanted to teach to myself; and it 
was not until I had come to the point of be;'ng able to deliver separate 
lectures, without notes, on Rent, Interest, Profits, Wages, Toryism,
Liberalism, Socialism, Communism, Anarchism, Tmde-Unionism, 
Co-operation, Democracy, the Division of Society iuto Cla,sses, and 
the Suitability of Human Nature to Systems of Just Distribution, 
that I was a:ble to hanolc Social-Democracy as it must be handled 
before it can be preached in such a way as to present it to 
every sort of man from his own particular point of view. In 
old lecture lists of the Society you will find my name down 
for twelve different lectures or so. Nowadays I have only one, 
for which the secretary is good enough to invent four or five 
different names. Sometimes I am asked for one of the old ones, 
to my great dismay, as I forget all about them; but I get out of 
the difi1culty by delivering the new one under the old nn.n10, which 
does as well. I do not hesitate to say that all our best lecturer& 
have two or three old lectures at the back of every single point in 
their best new speeches; and this means that they have spent a 
certain number of years plodding away at footling little meetings and 
dull discussions, doggedly placing these before all private eng"gements,

howeYer tempting. A man's Socialistic acquisitiveness must be keen 
enough to make him actually prefer spending two or three nightsa week in speaking and debating, ot· in picking up social information 
eYen in the most dingy and scrappy way, to going to the theatre, 
or cJancing or drinking, or even sweetilearting, if he is to become a 
really competent propagandist-unless, of course, his daily work is 
of such a nature as to be in itself a training for political life; and 
that, we know, is the case with very few of us indeed. It is at such 
lecturing and debating work, and on squalid little committees and 
ridiculous little delegations to conferences of the three tailors of 
Tooley Street, with perhaps a fleputation to the Mayor thrown in 
once in a blue moon or so, that. the ordinary Fabian workman or 
clerk nmst qualify for his future seat on the Town Council, the School 
Board, or perhaps in the Cabinet. Itwas in that way that Bradlaugh,
for instance, gracJuated from being a boy evangelist to being one of 
the most formidable debaters in the House of Commons. And the 
only opponents who have ever held their own against the Fabians in 
debate haYe been men like Mr. Levy or Mr. Foote, who learnt in the 
same school. 

Collaring the " Star." 

Now let me return from this digression as to how we grounded 
ourselves in the historic, economic and moral bearings of Socialism, 
to consi!ler the consequences of our newly acquired proficiency. The 
first effect was, as we have already seen, to make us conscious that 
we were neither Anarchists nor Insurrectionists. We demolished 
Anarchism in the abstract by grinding it between human nature and 
the theory of economic rent; and when, driven in disarace out of 
Anderton's Hotel, and subsequently out of a chapel n~ar Wardour 


Street in which we bad taken refuge, we went to Willis's Rooms, 
the most aristocratic, and also, as it turned out, the cheapest placeof meeting in London, our favorite sport was inviting politicians and 
eccnomists to lecture to us, and then falling on them with all our 
erudition and debating skill, and making them wish they had never 
been born. The curious may consult the files of Mr. George Stand 
ring's extinct journal, called The Radical, for a graphic account. 
written by an individualist, of the fate of a well-known member of 
Parliament who was lured into our web on one of these occasions. 
The article is suggestively entitled, "Butchered to make a Fabiau 
Holiday." We also confuted Co-operation in the person of Mr. 
Benjamin Jones on a point on which we now see reason to belien: 
that we were entirely in the wrong, and he entirely in the right.

The butchery of the M.P. took place on the 16th March, 
1888, four months after the rout at Trafalgar Square. Trade had 
revived; and with the disappearance of the unemployed the 
occupation of the Federation was gone. Champion was trying to 
organize a Labor party with a new paper; Burns, just out of prisonfor the Square affair, was getting into political harness at Battersea; 
and the StaT newspaper was started. We collared the Sta1· by a stage-
army stratagem, and before the year was out had the assistant editor, 
Mr. H. W. Massingham, writing as extreme articles as Hyndmanhad ever written in Justice. Before the capitalist proprietors woke 
up to our game and cleared us out, the competition of the Stm-, which 
was immensely popular under what I may call the Fabian regime,
had encouraged a morning daily, the Chronicle, to take up the running; 
and the Star, when it tried to go back, found that it could not 
do so further than to Gladstonize its party politics. On other questions 
it remained and remains far more advanced than the wildest 
Socialist three years before ever hoped to sec a capitalist paper.
Nowadays even the Daily N ews has its Labor column, although rive 
years ago the editor would as soon have thought of setting aside a 
eolumn for Freethinkers. 

Permeating the Liberals. 

However, I must not anticipate. In 1888 we bad not been found 
-out even by the StaT. The Liberal party was too much preoccupiedover Mr. O'Brien's breeches and the Parnell Commission, with its 
dramatic climax in the suicide of the forger Pigott, to suspect that 
the liveliness of the extreme left of the Radical wing in London 
meant anything but the usual humbug about working-class interests. 
We now adopted a policy which snapped the last tie between our 
methods and the sectarianism of the Federation. We urged our 
membera to join the Liberal and Radical Associations of their dis 
tricts, or, if they preferred it, the Conservative Associations. We 
told them to become members of the nearest Radical Club and Co-
Dperative Store, and to get delegated to the Metropolitan Radical 
Federation and the Liberal and Radical Union if possible. On these 
bodies we made speeches and moved resolutions, or, better still, got 


19 


the Parliamentary candidate for the constituency to move them, and 
secured reports and encouraging little articles for him in the Star. 
We permeated the party organizations and pulled all the wires we 
could lay our hands on with our utmost adroitness and energy; and 
we succeeded so far that in 1888 we gained the solid advantage of 
a Progressive majority, full of ideas that would never have come 
into their heads had not the Fabian put them there, on the first 
London County Council. The generalship of this movement was 
undertaken chiefly by Sidney Webb, who played such bewilderingconjuring tricks with the Liberal thimbles and the Fabian peas, that 
to this day both the Liberals and the sectarian Socin.lists stand 
a.ghast at him. It was exciting whilst it lasted, all this "permeationof the Liberal party," as it was called; and no person with the 
smallest political intelligence is likely to deny that it made a foot-
bold for us in the press and pushed forward Socialism in municipal 
politics to an extent which can only be appreciated by those who remember 
how things stood before our campaign. When we published 
"Fabian Essays" at the end of 1889, having ventured with greatmisgiving on a subscription edition of a thousand, it went off like 
smoke ; and our cheap edition brought up the circulation to about 
twenty thousand. In the meantime we had been cramming the 
public with information in tracts, on the model of our earliest 
financial success in that department, namely, "Facts for Socialists," 
the first edition of which actually brought us a profit-the onlyinstance of the kind then known. In short, the years 1888, 1889, 1890 
saw a Fabian boom, the reverberation of which in the provinces at 
last produced the local Fabian societies which are represented here 
to-night. And I now come to the most important part of this paper;
for I must at once tell you that we are here, not to congratulate ourselves 
on the continuance of that boom, but to face the fact that it 
is over, and that the time has come for a new departure.

One day, about a year ago, a certain "Liberal and Radical' 
London member of Parliament, having been coaxed by Webl 
to the point of admitting that his aims were exactly those of thE 
Socialists, namely, the extinction of incomes derived from pri·
vately appropriated rent and interest, and that it was thereforE 
his high destiny to lead the working-classes along the path ol 
progress, was asked to get to business. Thereupon he made 
the discovery that he was not a Socialist and that Webb was. 
The intelligence spread with remarkable rapidity to all the 
official Liberals who had been reached by the Fabian influence; 
and the word was promptly given to close up the ranks of 
Capitalism against the insidious invaders. As in the case of 
the Star newspaper, the discovery came too late. It is only 
necessary to compare the Nottingham program of the National 
Liberal Federation for 1887 with the Newcastle program for 1891, 
or to study the Liberal and Radical Union program for the 1892 
London County Council election, to appreciate the extent to which the 
policy of permeating the party organizations with Socialism had 
Rucceeded. The official leaclers of the Liberal party cannot now turn 


their followers back : they can only refuse to lead them and sit as 
tight as they can under the circumstances. The Radicals are at last 
conscious that the leaders are obstructing them ; and they are now 
looking for a lead in attacking the obstruction. They say to us, in 
effect, "Your policy of permeating has been successful: we are permeatecl; 
and the result is that we find all the money and all the official 
power of our leaders, who are not permeated and cannot be permeated,
arrayed against us. Now shew us how to get rid of those leaders 
or to fight them." I want to impress this situation on you, because 
there are some Rip Van Winkles in our movement who are only now 
waking up to the special variety of permeating work which was 
begun in 1886 and finished in 1890, and who, now that it is over 
and done with as far as the London Fabian is concerned, are protesting 
loudly against its being begun. No doubt there still remains, 
in London as everywhere else, a vast mass of political raw material, 
calling itself Liberal, Radical, Tory, Labor, and what not, or even 
not calling itself anything at all, which is ready to take the Fabian 
stamp if it is adroitly and politely pressed down on it. There are 
thousands of thoroughly Socialized Radicals to-day who would have 
resisted Socialism fiercely if it had been forced on them with taunts, 
threats, and demands that they should recant all their old professions 
and commit what they regard as an act of political !1postasy. And 
there are thousands more, not yet Socialized, who must be dealt 
with in the same manner. But whilst our propaganda is thus still 
chiefly a matter of permeation, that game is played out in our 
politics. As long ago as 1889 we plainly said, in the last Fabian 
Essay-Bland's "Political Outlook"-that the moment the partyleaders realized what we were driving at, they would rally round all 
the institutions we wertl attacking, even at the cost of coalescing 
with their rivals for office, unless they could put us off more 
cheaply by raising false issues such as Leaseholds Enfranchisement, 
Disestablishment of the Church, or bogus " endings or mendings"
of their cherished bulwark the House of Lords. We now feel 
that we have brought up all the political laggards and pushedtheir parties as far as they can be pushed, and that we have therefore 
cleared the way to the beginning of the special political 
work of the Soeialist-that of forming a Collectivist party of those 
who have more to gain than to lose by Collectivism, solidly arrayedagainst those who have more to lose than to gain by it. That is the 
real subject of this Conference. Whether the time is ripe now or 
not, to that it must come at last; for even the most patient Fabians 
are growing anxious to make their position clear and to escape from 
the suspicion of being a mere left wing of the party which rallies 
round l\lessrs. Bryar..t & May's statue to Mr. Gladstone. We are 
especially loth to let the forthcoming general election pass without 
making it known that the eight years' work which I am sketchingfor you in this paper was not done for the sake of the sweaters and 
place-hunters who will presently be claiming the credit of it at the 
polls. Not that we would hesitate to let the credit go for the moment 
to any quarter, however venal, from which we could get a fair return 


21 


in substantial concessions to our cause ; but in this instance we 
believe that our natural inclinations and our political interests point 
to the same course, that of making it understood that Fabianism is 
neither ofiicial Liberalism nor official Toryism, but an intelligentCollectivism that will eventually wear down both. 

The Tactics of the Social -Democratic 
Federation. 

And now, some of you will be inclined to ask whether this does 
not mean that we have at last come round to the views of the Social-
Democratic Federation? The reply is that our views have always 
been the same as those of that body. On the 29th February, 1884, 
Mr. Bland moved at a Fabian meeting the follo"':ing resolution: 

"That whilst not entirely agreeing with all the statements and phrases 
used in the pamphlets of the Democratic Federation and in the speeches 
of 1\Ir. Hyndman, this Society considers that the DeJ?'locratic Federation 
is doing a good and useful work and is worthy of sympathy and support." 

That was carried nern. con. ; and it would no doubt be carried 
unanimously here this evening if Mr. Bland were to move it again.
But we did not proceed to amalgamate with them in 1884 any more 
than we shall to-night. Our organization and our methods are 
radically different; and the experience of the past eight years has 
strengthened our preference for our own and confirmed our objection 
to theirs. Let me enumerate a few of the differences. In the first 
place, the Fabian Society is a society for helping to bring about the 
Socialization of the industrial resources of the country. The 
Social-Democratic Federation is a society for enlisting the whole 
proletariat of the country in its own ranks and itself Socializing 
the national industry. The Federation persistently claims to be the 
only genuine representative of working-class interests in England.
It counts no man a Socialist until he has joined it, and supports no 
candidate who is not a member. If one of its speakers supports an 
outside'eandidate, he is disowned. Only the other day the Executive 
Council of the Federation proposed that no member should even 
vote for any candidate not enrolled in its ranks.* The Federation 
chooses its own candida0es without consulting its neighbors, and 
sends them to the poll, when it has the money, without the 
slightest regard to the possibility of such a course making a 
present of the seat to the least Socialistic candidate in the field. 
This implacably sectarian policy evidently depends for its success 
on the recruiting powers of the Society which adopts it. It 
was planned in the days when we all believed that Socialism had 
only to be explained to the working-classes to bring every working


• This policy was finally adopted, and promulgated in the S.D.F. Manifesto 
issued on the occasion of the General Election iu Juue-July, 1892. See, however 
the postscript to this tract. 

man, not only in England but in Europe-nay, in the world -into 
our ranks. It would clearly be the right policy if four out of everyfive men in England were members of the Social-Democratic Federation. 
But the experience of over half a century of agitation has 
proved that no such result is possible. The Federation, in every 
centre of the population where it exists, is practically as insignificant 
a minority as the Fabian. The ablest working-class agitators it ever 
produced, John Burns and Tom Mann, had to free themselves from 
it the moment they gained sufficient political experience to see that 
a united nation of subscribers to the Social-Democratic Federation 
can never be anything more than a dream. A necessary part of the 
Federation policy is the denunciation, as misleaders of the people, of 
Radicals, Co-operators, Teetotallers, Trade-Unionists, Fabians, and 
all rival propagandists. The result of this is that the Federation 
branches are not merely insignificant in numbers, but unpopular 
as well, in spite of the admittedly stimulating effect of their meetings 
on the political activity of the working class. Their hand 
being against every outsider, every outsider's hand is naturallyagainst them; .and as the outsiders outnumber them by more 
than a thousand to one, they cannot get any real influence among 
the men who really manage the political work and organizationof the working-classes, and who are of course all Co-operators,
Teetotallers, Trade Unionists, or party men of one kind or another. 
For it is only your middle-class enthusiast who comes into the 
movement by reading Mazzini or Marx, without any previous experience 
in the only sort of organization hitherto open to working 
men of any organizing capacity. The net result is that wherever the 
Federation can shew a fair degree of success in branch work, it, will 
be found that the branches have modified their policy in the Fabian 
direction. In Battersea, for instance, they were only masters of the 
situation whilst they followed John Burns, who, like Tom Mann, is 
insanely denounced by the central council as a mercenary renegade,
and who, in return, makes no secret of his unbounded contemptfor Federation tactics. At Manchester, too, where the Federation 
has had a creditable success, the branch practically repudiates the 
central authority by maintaining harmonious relations with the new 
Unionism which Burns inaugurated down at the docks here. In 
London the Federation would be a cipher but for the fact that it 
has stopped short of boycotting the Trades Council, on which it 
is strongly represented. 

Fabian Tactics. 

Now let us look at the Fabian tactics. We have never indulgeJ 
in any visions of a Fabian army any bigger than a stage army. In 
London we have never publicly recruited except for other bodies. 
When I lecture for the Federation, I do not invite workmen to join 
the Fabian, but to join the branch for which I am lecturing. So far 
are we from encouraging the rush of members that has lately come 


23 


upon us, that we have actually tried to check it by' insisting on 
stricter guarantees of the sincerity of the applicants' acceptance of 
our basis; and I do not hesitate to say that if it were not for the need 
of spreading the cost of our work over as large a number of subscribers 
as possible, we should be tempted to propose the limitation of 
our society in London to a hundred picked members. We have 
never advanced the smallest pretension to represent the working-
classes of this country. No such absurdity as a candidate nominated 
by the :Fabian Society alone has ever appeared in London, though 
we flatter ourselves that a candidate finds it no disadvantage now to 
be a Fabian. Although we think we can see further ahead than the 
mere Trade-Unionist or Co-operator, we are ready to help them 
loyally to take the next step ahead that lies in their path. When 
we go to a Radical Club to inveigh against the monopolies of land 
and capital, we know perfectly that we are preaching no new doctrine, 
and that the old hands were listening to such denunciations 
twenty-five years before we were born, and are only curious to know 
whether we have anything new in the way of a practical remedy.
In short, we know that for a long time to come we can only make 
headwa.y by gaining the confidence of masses of men outside our 
Society who will have nothing to do with us unless we first prove 
ourselves safe for all sorts of progressive work. For this we are 
denounced by the Social-Democratic Federation as compromisers of 
our principles, Liberal wire-pullers, and sham middle-class Socialists 
of the gas-and-water variety.

Again, consider our relation to the local Societi3s. Unlike the 
Federation branches, these are so perfectly independent of our control 
or dictation, that one of them has already tried Federation tactics at 
the School Board election, with the result that its candidates were 
thoroughly beaten and the Society effectually discredited. We insisted 
on this independence ourselves, seeing the advantage of each Societybeing able to appeal for support as an independent and autonomous 
local body, not committed in any way to the proceedings of peoplein London on whom they could have no effective check, and yetsharing the prestige and freedom from insurrectionary associations 
of the Fabian name. Suppose we reversed this policy, and made 
the whole set of Fabian Societies into a Fabian Federation on the 

S.D.F. plan. They would all become the slaves of a council here in 
London on which they could not be represented. For though theywould be entitled to have delegates on it, yet as they could not afford. 
to pay the expenses of these delegates up and down for every council 
meeting, they would have to fall back on the S.D.F. or Trade-Union 
plan of asking Ldndon members to represent them, which would 
produce that worst form of pseudo-democratic slavery which consists 
in the appearance of representation without the reality of it. 
Take another point. The Federation runs a newspaper called 
Justice, which has not hitherto been worth a penny to any man 
whose pence are so scarce as a laborer's, and which has made repeated 
attacks on the ordinary "·orking-class organizations without 
wbo~e co-operation Socialists can at prcscut do nothing except cry in 


the wilderness. The branches are expected to sell this paper at 
their meetings. Now I hope no Fabian tract at present in the 
market is worth less than a penny, or is calculated to give needless 
offence to any of our allies. A to a paper, we recognize tha~ a 
workman expects for his penny a week a newspaper as big and as full 
of general news as any of the regular Sunday papers. Therefore 
our policy has been to try to induce some of these regular papers to 
give a column or two to Socialism, calling it by what name theyplease. And I have no hesitation in saying that the effect of this 
policy as shewn in the 1J1anchesteT Sunday Chronicle, the Star, the 
London Daily Chronicle, and other more exclusively working-class 
papers, notably The Cla1·ion, has done more for the cause than all 
the time and money that has been wasted on J~tstice since the Star 
was founded. F abian News does everything for us that Jttstice does 
for the Federation ; but what would you think of us if we invited 
you to offer it for a penny to the man in the street as the leading 
organ of Social-Democracy in England? Our mission is to Socialize 
the Press as we hope to Socialize Parliament and the other Estates 
-of the realm, not to run the Press ourselves. 

Finally, how has the Federation policy succeeded as a means of 
maintaining discipline and solidarity in its own ranks? Evidently 
not at all. First came the secession of the Socialist League, in 
which they lost their greatest man, William Morris, besides Andreas 
Scheu, Belfort Bax, the late C. J . Faulkner, Robert Banner, E. T. 
Craig (of Ralahine fame), Bland, Aveling, Mrs. Marx-Aveling, and 
others. But they retained Helen Taylor, John Burns, Champion, and 
Tom Mann. Not one of these remain with them. Now look at the 
Fabian record. Our first regular Executive Council was that appointed 
to serve from January 1885 to April 1886. The names are Pease, 
Bland, Shaw, Webb, and Mrs. Wilson. To them we added Mrs. 
Besant and Podmore in 1886, Olivier and Phillips in 1887, Graham 
Wallas and William Clarke in 1888. Look at the Executive of to-day,
and you find Webb, Bland, Shaw, Pease, Olivier and WallaE\ there 
still ; and you would find Podmore, Phillips and Clarke but for the 
fact that they voluntarily withdrew in favor of members who were 
better able to attend the Executive meetings. They are still available 
whenever they are called upon. Mrs. Wilson is the only one 
whom we have lost through any political incompatibility; for Mrs. 
Besant's loss is a grief which we share with all the advanced societies 
in London except the Theosophic Society. We are a regular old gang. 
But if you consider that we are all persons of tolerably strong individuality, 
and very diverse temperaments, and take that along with 
the fact that no one of us is strong enough to impose his will on the 
rest, or weak enough to allow himself to be overridden, you will, 
I think, allow me to claim our escape from the quarrels which rent 
asunder both the Federation and the League as a proof that our 
methods stand the test of experience in the matter of keeping our 

forces together. 

In saying 1<Jl this, I have had to be a little hard on the S.D.F., 

the rank and file of which are for the most part our very good friends, 


as they shew by the freedom with which they help us and invite 
us to help them in any convenient way without the slightest regard 
to the denunciations of us in which J~~stice periodically indulges. 
On our side we take no offence and bear no grudge, knowing too well 
how often our success has been made easy by their exertions in 
breaking ground for us. But I think you will now see that it is 
impossible for us ever to amalgamate with the Social-Democratic 
Federation whilst it remains a federation, or to recommend any of our 
local Societies to venture on such a step. If such an amalgamation 
ever takes place, it will come about by branches of the Federation 
from time to time throwing off the leading strings of that bodyand combining with the other Socialists of the town, including the 
Fabians, to form a local independent Socialist Society. 

Scientific Class Warfare. 

But however we may combine or divide our forces, our tactics 
must always depend on our strength at the moment. At present it 
is good tactics for the United States to bully Chili; but it would be 
bad tactics for Portugal to bully England. It is good tactics to run 
a Labor candidate at Battersea: it would be folly to run one at 
Hampstead. If the numbers of the Fabian Society in any constituency 
ever rise to the point of making the result of the election 
depend on the Fabian vote, that Society will not only run Fabian 
candidates, butwill run them with ahighhandedness that will astonish 
even the Federation. It may be said, roughly, that the tactics of 
the Fabian Society will change with every additional thousand of 
its members. Only, remember, the addition must be a real addition. 
Our rolls of membership must not be paoded with the names of deadheads 
who join in a fit of short-lived enthusiasm, and drop off after 
three weeks. In London we have always kept up a system of 
periodical purging so as to make our roll represent our real strength.
If a member disappears for any length of time, or ceases to subscribe, 
he is asked whether he has changed his mind, and is struck off if his 
reply is not satisfactory. Thus our first rule is not to try and deceive 
ourselves as to our power. I will not pretend that we are always as 
scrupulous in the matter of enlightening other people. Though we 
have never deceived the public by overstating our numbers, we have 
not always insisted on undeceiving them when they shewed a disposition 
to make concessions to us which they would perhaps have 
thought twice about if their notions of our bulk had been derived 
from our official records instead of from their imaginations. But in 
politics as in the game of poker, bluffing belongt; only to the earlydays of the game. The moment you go to the poll, all concealment 
is at an end. When the Social-Democratic Federation consisted of 
about forty members, the Clm1·ch Review estimated them at about 
4,000; and it was possible then to laugh at the Clmnh Review with 
an R.ir which conveyed to the superstitious that 40,000 would have 
been nearer the mark. But after 1885 there \Yas an end of that, 


just as there will be an end, after the coming general election, of all 
romantic notions about the influence of the Fabian. In 1888 it only 
.cost us twenty.eight postcards written by twenty-eight members to 
convince the newly-born Star newspaper that London was aflame 
with Fabian Socialism. In 1893 twenty-eight dozen postcards will 
not frighten the greenest editor in London into giving us credit for 
an ounce over our real weight. The School Board election has robbed 
us of half our imaginary terrors; the County Council election maytake away the rest; the General election will finish the bluffingelement in our tactics for ever.* No more unearned increment of 
prestige for us then ; for though rumor may count us at two hundred 
to the score, the returning-officer will count us strictly at twelve to 
the dozen, and publish the results where everyone will read them. 
Thenceforth we shall play with our cards on the table. Our business 
will then be, not to talk crudely about the Class War, with verycloudy notions as to the positions of~e two camps and the uniforms 
of the two armies (both of which, by-the-bye, will sport red flags),
but to organize it scientifically so that we shall drain the oppositehost of every combatant whose interests really lie with ours. The 
day has gone by for adopting Fergus O'Connor's favorite test of the 
unshaven chin, the horny hand, and the fustian jacket as the true distinctive 
mark of the soldier of liberty. Nor will the Trade-Unionist 
test of having at some time done manual work for weekly wages 
serve us. Such distinctions date from the days when even the ability 
to read and write was so scarce, and commanded so high a price both 
in money and social status, that the educated man belonged economically 
to the classes and not to the masses. Nowadays the Board 
Schools have changed all that. The commercial clerk, with his 
reading, his writing, his arithmetic and his shorthand, is a proletarian,
and a very miserable proletarian, only needing to be awakened from 
his poor little superstition of shabby gentility to take his vote from 
the Tories and hand it over to us. The small tradesmen and ratepayers 
who are now allying themselves with the Duke of Westminster 
in a desperate and unavailing struggle against the rising rates entailed 
by the eight hours day and standard wages for all public servants, 
besides great extensions of corporate activity in providing accommodation 
and education at the public expense, must sooner or later see 
that their interest lies in making common cause with the workers to 
throw the burden of taxation directly on to unearned incomes, and 
to secure for capable organizers of industry the prestige, the pensions,
and the permanence and freedom from anxiety and competitionwhich municipal employment offers. The professional men of no 
more than ordinary ability, struggling with one another for work in 

• This anticipation has fortunately not been justified by the event. Six 
members of the Fabian Society arc now members of the County Council; and it 
is not too much to claim that tho result of the General Election upset every 
estimate of the political situation except the Fabian one. See the preface to the 
1892 edition of Fabian Tract No. 11, "The Workers' Political Program." 

27 

the overstocked professions, are already becoming far more tired of 
Unsocialism and Competition than the dock laborers are, because 
revivals of trade bring them no intervals of what they consider 
good times. In short, all men except those who possess either exceptional 
ability or property which brings them in a considerable 
unearned income, or both, stand to lose instead of to win by Unsocialism 
; and sooner or later they must find this out and throw in 
their lot with us. Therefore to exclude middle-class and professional 
men from our ranks is not " scientific Socialism" at all, but the 
stupidest sort of class prejudice. It would be far more sensible to 
exclude those skilled artisans who make several pounds a week; 
work overtime with reckless selfishness ; and have even been known 
to refuse to employ laborers belonging to unions. But there is 
no need to exclude anybody. The real danger is that since we 
are certain to have an increasing number of professional men, tradesmen, 
clerks, journalists and tqe like in our ranks, these men may bytheir superior education, or rather their superior literateness-which 
is not exactly the same thing-and by their more polished manners, 
be chosen too often as candidates at elections and as committee-men. 
This would be a most fatal mistake ; for it is of the first importance 
that all our candidates and executive council-men should be the 
ablest men in the movement, whereas the presumption must alwaysbe that our recruits from the professions and from business would 
not have joined us if they had not lacked the exceptional energy and 
practical turn which still enable men to make fortunes, or at least 
very comfortable incomes, in those classes. To become a Fabian 
agitator would hardly be looked on as promotion by Sir Charles 
Russell, or Mr. Whiteley, or the President of the Royal Academy, 
or a physician or dentist earning £1,500 a year. Speaking for 
myself as a professional man, claiming to be able to do a somewhat 
special class of work, I may say that the more my ability becomes 
known, the more do I find myself pressed to spend my time in 
shovelling guineas into my pocket instead of writing Fabian 
papers, attending to the Fabian Executive work, lecturing, revising 
or compiling tracts, and writing papers like the present. My case is 
a typical one; and it shews that if the working-classes run after 
middle-class men as representatives, they will have to choose between 
pecuniarily disinterested men and men who are discontented because 
they are not clever enough to get their fill of work or money in 
their professions or businesses. Now, though every clever and 
warmhearted young gentleman bachelor enjoys from two to ten 
years of disinterestedness, during which good work can be got from 
him, yet in the long run he gets tired of being disinterested. 
Perrnanentl;y disinterested men of ability are very scarce : it is easier 
to find a thousand men who will sacrifice valuable chances in life once 
than to find a single man who will do it twice. And average duffers, 
though plentiful, are not to be trusted with the generalship of so great 
~campaign as ours. Consequently, the workers should make it a rule 
always to choose one of their own class as a candidate or councilman, 
except when the middle-class candidate has given special proofs 


of his ability and disinterestedness. This is why I myself have so 
often urgeu working-class audiences to believe in themselves and not 
run after the tall hats and frock coats. It is only the clever wage-
workman to whom political leadership in the workman's cause 

comes as a promotion. 
My task, I am happy to say, is now done. You know what we 
have gone through, and what you will probably have to go through. 
You know why we believe that the middle-classes will have their 
share in bringing about Socialism, and why we do not hold aloof 
from Radicalism, Trade-Unionism, or any of the movements which 
are traditionally individualistic. You know, too, that none of you 
can more ardently desire the formation of a genuine Collectivist 
political party, distinct from Conservative and Liberal alike, than we 
do. But I hope you also know that there is not the slightest use in 
merely expressing your aspirations unless you can give us some 
voting power to back them, and that your business in the provincesis, in one phrase, to create that voting power. Whilst our backers 
at the polls are counted by tens, we must continue to crawl and 
drudge and lecture as best we can. When they are counted by 
hundreds we can permeate and trim and compromise. When theyrise to tens of thousands we shall take the field as an independent 
party. Give us hundreds of thousands, as you can if you try hard 
enough, and we will ride the whirlwind and direct the storm. 


29 

POSTSCRIPT. 

The lapse of time between the reading of the above paper and 
its publication, makes it necessary, in justice to the Social-Democratic 
Federation, to add a few words. The explanation of the 
delay is very simple : a glance back at pages 5 and 6 will shew that 
their publication on the eve of the General Election might have 
injured the prospects of the two Federation candidates who were in 
the :field. The close of the polls has not only set the Fabian 
Society free to issue this tract ; it has also apparently convinced 
the S.D.F. of the practically reactionary effect of its sectarian 
tactics. The victory of Mr. Dadabhai N aoroji, the official Liberal 
candidate for Central Finsbury, who won by a majority of three 
only, was secured by the votes of the Clerkenwell branch of the 
S.D.F., which very sensibly threw off its allegiance to the central 
council and " went Fabian" for the occasion in flat defiance of the 

S.D.F. manifesto calling on the workers to vote for none but Social-
Democratic candidates. Instead of a sentence of excommunication, 
there came from headquarters the following utterance in Jttstice 
(No. 444, 16th July, 1892), presumably from the pen of Mr. Belfort 
Bax, who was then acting as editor. 
PRINCIPLES AND THEIR APPLICATION. 
Talking about Naoroji affords us an opportunity of seconding the 
point mentioned in the letter above referred to, namely, as to the desirability 
on special occasions of relaxing the generally excellent principle of 
not voting or working for either side. The laxity we complained of last 
week which is shown by members of the S.D.F. who get the "election 
fever" in throwing themselves indiscriminately into the struggle on the 
Radical side irrespective of the programme or the candidate is undoubtedly 
due to the slightly pedantic attitude sometimes taken up on this point. 
Now the pollings are over we do not hesitate to say that we think that the 
non possumus rule should have been relaxed in the North Lambeth election 
for the purpose of keeping Stanley out, and thereby checkmating the 
designs of tho British East Africa Company, even at the expense of assisting 
a colorless Radical nonentity to obtain the seat; and also in Central 
Finsbury, both as a demonstration against the conduct of official Libera]. 
ism and for the sake of getting a friendly outsider the chance of bringing 
the claims of the people of India for the first time prominently before the 
larger British public. If you give a Social Democrat some, at least more 


or Jess, useful work in an election, you keep him out of the mischief of 
squfl.ndering his time in promiscuous assistance to worthless Liberals. 
For it is not given to every man during the excitement of election times 
to be able to twirl his thumbs and repeat the obvious Socialist truism tha.t 
one political !Jarty is as bad as the other, as the l\foslem reiterates the 
well-worn and doubtless to him equally certain dictum, "Allah is grea.t." 
There may be a zeal of principle, "but not with discretion." We take it 
there is no compromise in a momentary alliance with any party for the 
purpose of carrying an important point. This is a very different thing 
from the principle of " permeation" advocated by the Fabians. 

The recantation in the last sentence but one is complete. The 
last sentence means only that since Justice has given the Fabian 
dog a bad name, it feels bound to go on hanging him in spit8 'of its 
tardy discovery of his good qualities. 

I do not know whether this declaration of Opportunism is any· 
thing more than a passing excuse for the action of the insurgent 
branch. It would, however, be clearly unfair to allow pages 21 and 
22 to become public without mentioning it. 

July, 1892. G.B. S. 


BASIS OF THE FABIAN SOCIETY. 


The FABIAN SociETY consists of Socialists. 

It therefore aims at the re-organization 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 aud acquiredadvantages 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 conveniently 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 proprietaryclass, the worker being now dependent on that class for leave to 
earn a Jiving. 

If these measures be carried out, without compensation (though 
not without such relief to expropriated individuals as may seem 
fit to the community), Rent and Interest will be added to the reward 
of labor, the idle class now living on the labor of others will necessarily 
disappear, and practical equality of opportunity will be 
maintained by the spontaneous action of economic forces with mueh 
less interference with personal liberty than the present systementails. 

For the attainment of these ends the Fabian Society looks to 
the spread of Socialist opinions, and the social and political changes 
consequent thereon. 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. 

The work of the Fabian Society takes, at present, the followingforms:


1. Meetings for the discussion of questions connected with Socialism. 
2. 
The further investigation of economic problems, and the collection of 
facts contributing to their elucidation. · 
3. 
The issue of publications containing information on social questions, and 
arguments relating to Socialism. 
4. The promotionof Socialist lectures anddebates in other Societies and Club . 
5. 
The representation of the Society in public conferences and discussions 
on social questions. 
The members are pledged to take part according to their abilitiEs 
and opportunities in the general work of the Society, and are 
expected to contribute annually to the Society's funds. 
The Society seeks recruits from all ranks, believing that not only 
those who suffer from the present system, but also many who are 
themselves enriched by it, recognize its evils and would welcome a 
remedy. 
The Society meets for lectures and discussions on two Fridays in 
the month, at 8 p.m. 


F
F
ABIAN SOCIETY .-The Fabian Society consists of Socialists. A ste.te. 
ment of its Rules; particulars of the conditions upon which members will 
lecture in London or the country; and the following publications can be 
obtained from the Secretary, at the Fabian Office, 276 Strand, London, W.C. 

FABIAN ESSAYS IN SOCIALISM. (35thThousand.)
Paper cover, I/-; plain cloth, 2j-, post free from the Secretary. 
FABIAN TRACTS and LEAFLETS. 


Tracts, each 16 to 32 pp., price 1d., or 9d. per doz., unless otherwise stated,
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I.-On General Socialism in its various aspects.
TRACTS.-79· A Word of Remembrance and Caution to the Rich. By JOHN 
WooLMAN. 78. Socialtsm and the T eaching of Christ. By Dr. JOHN CLIFFORD. 
87. The same in Welsh. 42. Chnstian Socialism. By Rev. S.D. HEADLAM. 
75· Labor in the Longest Reign. By SIDNF.Y WEBB. 72. The Moral 
Aspects of Socialism. By SIDNEYBALL. 6g. Difficulties of Individualism. 
By SIDNEY WEBB. 51. Soc1alism: True and False. By S. WEBB. 45· The 
Impossibilities of Anarchism. By BERNARD SuAw (price 2d.). IS. EnglishProgress towards Social Democracy. By S. WEBB. 7· Capital and Land. 
A survey of thedistribution of property among the classes in England (5th edn. 
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income ancl the condition of the people. (8th edn. revised 1899.) LEAFLETS.


IJ. What Socialism Is. I. Why are the Many Poor? 38. The same in Welsh 

II.-On Application of Socialism to Particular Problems. 
TRACTS.-g8. State Railways for Ireland. 88. The Growth of Monopolyin English Industry. By H. W. MACROSTY. 86. Municipal Drink Traffic. 

85. Liquor Licensing at Home and Abroad. By E. R. PEASE 84. Economics 
of Direct Employment. 83. State Arbitration and the Living Wage.
8o. Shop-life and 1ts R eform. 74· The State and its Functions in New 
Zealand. 73· Case for State Pensions in Old Age. By GEo. TuRNER. 
67. Women and the Factory Acts. By Mrs. SIDNEY WEBB. so. Sweating:
its Cause and Remedy. 48. Eight Hours by Law. 23. Case for an EightHours Bill. 47· The Unemployed. By J. BuRNS, M.P. LEAFLETS.-8g. Old 
Age Pensions at Work. Ig. What the Farm Laborer Wants. 
Jll.-On Local Government Powers : How to use them. 
TRACTS.-82. Workmen's Compensation Act: what it means and how to 
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P eople. 62. Parish and District Councils. 61. The London CountyCouncil. 55· The Workers' School Board Program. 54· The Humanizing 
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London's Heritage in the City Guilds. Municipalization of 
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V.-On Fabian Policy.

70. Report on Fabtan Policy and Resolutions presented to the Internat. 
Socialist Congress. 41. The Fabian Society: its Early History.
By BERNARD SHAW. 
VI.-Question Leaflets, containing Questions for Candidates for the 
following bodies :-No. 20, Poor Law Guardians. No. 24, Parliament. No. 
25, School Boards. No. 26, London County Council. No. 27, Town Councils. 
No. 28, County Councils, Rural. No. 56, Parish Councils. No. 57, Rural 
District Coun.:ils. No. 59, Urban District Councils. 

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