ould 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, ei