efinite
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. "We permeated the party organizations," writes Shaw,
"and pulled all the wires we could lay our hands on with our utmost
adroitness and energy.... The generalship of this movement was undertaken
chiefly by Sidney Webb, who played such bewildering conjuring tricks with
the Liberal thimbles and the Fabian peas that to this day both the
Liberals and the sectarian Socialists stand aghast at him." Few Americans
know how great has been this influence on English political history for
the last twenty years. The well-known Minority Report of the Poor Law
Commission bears the Webb signature most conspicuously. Fabianism began
to achieve a reputation for getting things done--for taking part in
"practical affairs." Bernard Shaw has found time to do no end of
campaigning and even the parochial politics of a vestryman has not seemed
too insignificant for his Fabian enthusiasm. Graham Wallas was a
candidate in five municipal elections, and has held an important office
as member of the London County Council.

But the original Fabian enthusiasm has slackened. One might ascribe it to
a growing sense that concrete programs by themselves will not insure any
profound regeneration of society. H. G. Wells has been savage and often
unfair about the Fabian Society, but in "The New Machiavelli" he touched,
I believe, the real disillusionment. Remington's history is in a way
symbolic. Here was a successful political reformer, coming more and more
to a disturbing recognition of his helplessness, perceiving the
aimlessness and the unreality of political life, and announcing his
contempt for the "crudification" of all issues. What Remington missed was
what so many reformers are beginning to miss--an underlying philosophical
habit.

Mr. Wallas seems to have had much the same experience. In the midst of a
bustle of activity, politics appeared to have no center to which its
thinking and doing could be referred. The truth was driven home upon him
that political science is a science of human relationship with the human
beings left out. So he writes that "the thinkers of the past, from Plato
to Bentham and Mill, had each his ow