The History of the Fabian Society | Page 5

earlier days had proposed
segregated communities; the Co-operators had tried voluntary
associations; the Positivists advocated moral suasion; the Chartists
favoured force, physical or political; the Marxists talked revolution and
remembered the Paris Commune. George wrote in a land where the
people ruled themselves, not only in fact but also in name. The United
States in the seventies was not yet dominated by trusts and controlled
by millionaires. Indeed even now that domination and control,
dangerous and disastrous as it often is, could not withstand for a
moment any widespread uprising of the popular will. Anyway, George
recognised that in the Western States political institutions could be
moulded to suit the will of the electorate; he believed that the majority
desired to seek their own well-being and this could not fail to be also
the well-being of the community as a whole. From Henry George I
think it may be taken that the early Fabians learned to associate the new
gospel with the old political method.
But when we came to consider the plan proposed by George we quickly
saw that it would not carry us far. Land may be the source of all wealth
to the mind of a settler in a new country. To those whose working day
was passed in Threadneedle Street and Lombard Street, on the floor of
the Stock Exchange, and in the Bank of England, land appears to bear

no relation at all to wealth, and the allegation that the whole surplus of
production goes automatically to the landowners is obviously untrue.
George's political economy was old-fashioned or absurd; and his
solution of the problem of poverty could not withstand the simplest
criticism. Taxation to extinction of the rent of English land would only
affect a small fraction of England's wealth.
There was another remedy in the field. Socialism was talked about in
the reviews: some of us knew that an obscure Socialist movement was
stirring into life in London. And above all John Stuart Mill had spoken
very respectfully of Socialism in his "Political Economy," which then
held unchallenged supremacy as an exposition of the science. If, he
wrote, "the choice were to be made between Communism[1] with all its
chances, and the present state of society with all its sufferings and
injustices, if the institution of private property necessarily carried with
it as a consequence that the produce of labour should be apportioned as
we now see it almost in inverse proportion to labour, the largest
portions to those who have never worked at all, the next largest to those
whose work is almost nominal, and so in descending scale, the
remuneration dwindling as the work grows harder and more
disagreeable until the most fatiguing and exhausting bodily labour
cannot count with certainty on being able to earn even the necessities of
life; if this or Communism were the alternative, all the difficulties,
great or small, of Communism would be but as dust in the balance."[2]
And again in the next paragraph: "We are too ignorant, either of what
individual agency in its best form or Socialism in its best form can
accomplish, to be qualified to decide which of the two will be the
ultimate form of human society."
More than thirty years had passed since this had been written, and
whilst the evils of private property, so vividly depicted by Mill, showed
no signs of mitigation, the remedies he anticipated had made no
substantial progress. The co-operation of the Rochdale Pioneers had
proved a magnificent success, but its sphere of operations was now
clearly seen to be confined within narrow limits. Profit-sharing then as
now was a sickly plant barely kept alive by the laborious efforts of
benevolent professors. Mill's indictment of the capitalist system, in

regard to its effects on social life, was so powerful, his treatment of the
primitive socialism and communism of his day so sympathetic, that it is
surprising how little it prepared the way for the reception of the new
ideas. But to some of his readers, at any rate, it suggested that there was
an alternative to the capitalistic system, and that Socialism or
Communism was worthy of examination.[3]
The Socialism of Robert Owen had made a profound impression on the
working people of England half a century earlier, but the tradition of it
was confined to those who had heard its prophet. Owen, one of the
greatest men of his age, had no sense of art; his innumerable writings
are unreadable; and both his later excursions into spiritualism, and the
failure of his communities and co-operative enterprises, had clouded
his reputation amongst those outside the range of his personality. In
later years we often came across old men who had sat at his feet, and
who rejoiced to hear once more something resembling his teachings:
but