1906
all this disappeared and the Group system scarcely existed even on
paper.

With the expansion which began in 1906 the Groups revived. New members
were hungry for lectures: many of them desired more opportunities to
talk than the Society meetings afforded. All believed in or hoped for
Mr. Wells' myriad membership. He himself was glad to address
drawing-room meetings, and the other leaders did the same. Moreover the
Society was conducting a series of "Suburban Lectures" by paid
lecturers, in more or less middle-class residential areas of the Home
Counties. Lectures to the Leisured Classes, a polite term for the idle
rich, were arranged with considerable success in the West End, and other
lectures, meetings, and social gatherings were incessant.

For co-ordinating these various bodies the Fabian Society has created
its own form of organisation fitted to its peculiar circumstances, and
more like that of the British Empire than anything else known to me. As
is the United Kingdom in the British Empire, so in the Fabian movement
the parent Society is larger, richer, and more powerful, and in all
respects more important than all the others put together. Any form of
federal organisation is impossible, because federation assumes some
approach to equality amongst constituents. Our local societies, like the
British self-governing Dominions, are practically independent,
especially in the very important department of finance. The Groups, on
the other hand, are like County Councils, local organisations within
special areas for particular purposes, with their own finances for those
purposes only. But the parent Society is not made up of Groups, any more
than the British Government is composed of County Councils. The local
Groups consist of members of the Society qualified for the group by
residence in the group area; the "Subject Groups" of those associated
for some particular purpose.

The problem of the Society (as it is of the Empire) was to give the
local societies and the groups some real function which should emphasise
and sustain the solidarity of the whole; and at the same time leave
unimpaired the control of the parent Society over its own affairs.

The Second Annual Conference of Fabian Societies and Groups was held on
July 6th, 1907, under the chairmanship of Hubert Bland, who opened the
proceedings with an account of the first Conference held in 1892 and
described in an earlier chapter. Fifteen delegates from 9 loc