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Wells was never able to put forward a coherent program, to state an intelligible case but all that I know for certain is that it was not intelligible to the Fabians.
A note of Sebastian Cabots first discouerie of part of the Indies taken out of the latter part of Robert Fabians Chronicle not hitherto printed, which is in the custodie of M. Iohn Stow a diligent preseruer of Antiquities.
I suppose I'm sloppy ... the Fabians used to say so at Cambridge ... but I prefer the spectacle of a family round its own table to the spectacle of a crowd of assorted youngsters round a municipal school table! And I don't think we're getting the most out of our people! Just think of the millions of men and women in this country who really do not earn more than their keep! That isn't good enough.
In England, the Fabians taught the advantage of reform as against revolution, and of conciliatory bargaining as against irreconcilable antagonism. The method of gradual reform has many merits as compared to the method of revolution, and I have no wish to preach revolution.
They were not modernists or new theologians but atheists, not Fabians or social reformers but revolutionary socialists armed with bombs, not radicals but republicans, not divorce-law-reformers but "free lovers." A remarkable book was published in 1910 called Landmarks.
The socialism of the Fabians soon became a definite legislative program which the various political parties were to be bulldozed, cajoled and tricked into enacting. It was effective work, and few can question the value of it. Yet many admirers have been left with a sense of inadequacy. Unlike the orthodox socialists, the Fabians took an active part in immediate politics.
Shaw, he said, was "A good man fallen among Fabians" and a great deal further left than his company. He had not heard of "The Perfect Wagnerite," but was interested when I told him the general idea of the book, and turned fiercely on an interrupter who said that Shaw was a clown. "He may be a clown for the bourgeoisie in a bourgeois state, but they would not think him a clown in a revolution."
But when I remember that other world against which it reared its bourgeois banner of cleanliness and common sense, I will not end this chapter without doing it decent honour. Give me the drain pipes of the Fabians rather than the panpipes of the later poets; the drain pipes have a nicer smell.
Before this amalgamation it might have been said to have corresponded in methods to the ideals of the English Fabians and Economists like Sidney Webb and H. G. Wells. Had it proclaimed the motto "Put not your trust in soldiers" with the same vigour as it had continuously preached "Put not your trust in Parliamentarians," it would undoubtedly have become the party of the future.
The keynote of his system was to be opposition to the individualistic theory of the philosophic Liberals whom the Fabians hoped to succeed rather than opposition to the principles of capitalism, which lend themselves equally well either to an individualistic or to a collectivistic application. Just as Mr. Webb is the leading publicist, so Mr.
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