the total
is not given--and that the deficit in the Society's funds had been
reduced.

A favourite saying of Sidney Webb's is that the activity of the Fabian
Society is the sum of the activities of its members. His report as
Secretary of the work of the "Lecture Committee" states that a lecture
list with 33 names had been printed, and returns made by 31 lecturers
recorded 721 lectures during the year. Six courses of lectures on
Economics accounted for 52 of these. The "Essays" series of lectures was
redelivered by special request in a room lent by King's College,
Cambridge, and also at Leicester. Most of the other lectures were given
at London Radical Working Men's Clubs, then and for some years later a
much bigger factor in politics than they have been in the twentieth
century.

But an almost contemporary account of the life of Bernard Shaw, probably
the most active of the leaders, because the least fettered by his
occupation, is given in Tract 41 under the heading:

"HOW TO TRAIN FOR PUBLIC LIFE.

"We had to study where we could and how we could. I need not repeat
the story of the Hampstead Historic Club, founded by a handful of us
to read Marx and Proudhon, and afterwards turned into a systematic
history class in which each student took his turn at being professor.
My own experience may be taken as typical. For some years I attended
the Hampstead Historic Club once a fortnight, and spent a night in
the alternate weeks at a private circle of economists which has since
blossomed into the British Economic Association--a circle where the
social question was left out, and the work kept on abstract
scientific lines. I made all my acquaintances think me madder than
usual by the pertinacity with which I attended debating societies and
haunted all sorts of hole-and-corner debates and public meetings and
made speeches at them. I was President of the Local Government Board
at an amateur Parliament where a Fabian ministry had to put its
proposals into black and white in the shape of Parliamentary Bills.
Every Sunday I lectured on some subject which I wanted to teach to
myself; and it was not until I had come to the point of being able to
deliver separate lectures, without notes, on Rent, Interest, Profits,
Wages, Toryism, Liberalism, Socialism, Communism, Anarchism,
Trade-Unionism, Co-operation, Democracy, the Division of Society into
Classes, and the Suitabi