now govern us at
the request of proletarian Democracy.

At the present time we have, instead of the Utilitarians, the Fabian
Society, with its peaceful, constitutional, moral, economical policy of
Socialism, which needs nothing for its bloodless and benevolent
realization except that the English people shall understand it and
approve of it. But why are the Fabians well spoken of in circles where
thirty years ago the word Socialist was understood as equivalent to
cut-throat and incendiary? Not because the English have the smallest
intention of studying or adopting the Fabian policy, but because they
believe that the Fabians, by eliminating the element of intimidation
from the Socialist agitation, have drawn the teeth of insurgent poverty
and saved the existing order from the only method of attack it really
fears. Of course, if the nation adopted the Fabian policy, it would be
carried out by brute force exactly as our present property system is.
It would become the law; and those who resisted it would be fined, sold
up, knocked on the head by policemen, thrown into prison, and in the
last resort "executed" just as they are when they break the present law.
But as our proprietary class has no fear of that conversion taking
place, whereas it does fear sporadic cut-throats and gunpowder plots,
and strives with all its might to hide the fact that there is no moral
difference whatever between the methods by which it enforces its
proprietary rights and the method by which the dynamitard asserts his
conception of natural human rights, the Fabian Society is patted on the
back just as the Christian Social Union is, whilst the Socialist who
says bluntly that a Social revolution can be made only as all other
revolutions have been made, by the people who want it killing, coercing,
and intimidating the people who dont want it, is denounced as a
misleader of the people, and imprisoned with hard labor to shew him how
much sincerity there is in the objection of his captors to physical
force.

Are we then to repudiate Fabian methods, and return to those of the
barricader, or adopt those of the dynamitard and the assassin? On the
contrary, we are to recognize that both are fundamentally futile. It
seems easy for the dynamitard to say "Have you not just admitted that
nothing is ever conceded except to physical force? Did not Gladstone
admit that the Irish Church was disestablished, not by the spirit of
Liberalism, but by the explosio