and it will be plain
that Mrs. Webb would have been throwing away much of her available
resources if she had not used the device of a new organisation to
agitate for the Minority Report _ad hoc_.

Many Fabians served on the Committee--indeed a large proportion of our
members must have taken part in its incessant activities--and the
relations between the two bodies were close; but most of the subscribers
to the Committee and many of its most active members came from outside
the Society, and were in no way committed to its general principles.

For two whole years Mrs. Webb managed her Committee with great vigour
and dash. She collected for it a considerable income and a large number
of workers: she lectured and organised all over the country; she
discovered that she was an excellent propagandist, and that what she
could do with success she also did with zest.

In the summer of 1911 Mr. and Mrs. Webb left England for a tour round
the world, and Mrs. Webb had mentioned before she left that she was
willing to be nominated for the Executive. At the election in April,
1912, whilst still abroad, she was returned second on the poll, with 778
votes, only a dozen behind her husband.

From this point onwards Mrs. Webb has been on the whole the dominant
personality in the Society This does not necessarily mean that she is
abler or stronger than her husband or Bernard Shaw. But the latter had
withdrawn from the Executive Committee, and the former, with the rest of
the Old Gang, had made the Society what it already was. Mrs. Webb
brought a fresh and fertile mind to its councils. Her twenty years of
membership and intimate private acquaintance with its leaders made her
familiar with its possibilities, but she was free from the influence of
past failures--in such matters for example as Socialist Unity--and she
was eager to start out on new lines which the almost unconscious
traditions of the Society had hitherto barred.

* * * * *

The story of the Society has been traced to the conclusion of the
intervention of Mr. Wells, and I then turned aside to describe the
numerous new activities of the booming years which followed the Labour
Party triumph of 1906. I must now complete the history of the internal
affairs of the Society.

As a political body, the Society has usually, though not invariably,
issued some sort of pronouncement on the eve of a General Election. In
January, 1910, the Executive Com