system
could be justified by the writings of the foremost professors of
economic science. It embodied another Fabian characteristic of
considerable importance. Other Socialists then, and many Socialists now,
endeavoured by all means to accentuate their differences from other
people. Not content with forming societies to advocate their policy,
they insisted that it was based on a science peculiar to themselves, the
Marxian analysis of value, and the economic interpretation of history:
they strove too to dissociate themselves from others by the adoption of
peculiar modes of address--such as the use of the words "comrade" and
"fraternal"--and they were so convinced that no good thing could come
out of the Galilee of capitalism that any countenance of capitalist
parties or of the capitalist press was deemed an act of treachery.

The Fabians, on the other hand, tended to the view that "we are all
Socialists now." They held that the pronouncements of economic science
must be either right or wrong, and in any case science was not a matter
of party; they endeavoured to show that on their opponents' own
principles they were logically compelled to be Socialists and must
necessarily adopt Fabian solutions of social problems.

"Facts for Socialists" was the work of Sidney Webb. No other member
possessed anything like his knowledge of economics and statistics. It
is, as its title implies, simply a mass of quotations from standard
works on Political Economy, strung together in order to prove that the
bulk of the wealth annually produced goes to a small fraction of the
community in return either for small services or for none at all, and
that the poverty of the masses results, not as the individualists argue,
from deficiencies of individual character, but, as John Stuart Mill had
declared, from the excessive share of the national dividend that falls
to the owners of land and capital.

* * * * *

After the settlement, by a compromise in structure, of the conflict
between the anarchists and the collectivists, the Society entered a
period of calm, and the Executive issued a circular complaining of the
apathy of the members. Probably this is the first of the innumerable
occasions on which it has been said that the Society had passed its
prime. Moreover, the Executive Committee were blamed for "some habits"
which had "a discouraging effect" on the rest of the Society, and it was
resolved, for the first, b