esire
something more revolutionary than its political 'meliorism' and
'palliatives' accuse it of alliance with bureaucracy. They urge that it
relies on bureaucracy to administer social reforms from above; and they
conclude that, since any governing _class_ is anti-democratic, the
Fabians who believe in such a class are really anti-democratic. The
charge seems, as a matter of fact, difficult to sustain. Fabians from
the first felt and urged that the decentralisation of the State was a
necessary condition of the realisation of their aim. The municipality
and other local units were the natural bodies for administering the new
funds and discharging the new duties which the realisation of that aim
would create. 'A democratic State,' Shaw wrote, 'cannot become a Social
Democratic State unless it has in every centre of population a local
governing body as thoroughly democratic in its constitution as the
central Parliament.' The House of Commons he felt must develop 'into the
central government which will be the organ of federating the
municipalities.' Fabianism thus implied no central bureaucracy; what it
demanded was partly, indeed, a more efficient and expert central
government (and there is plenty of room for that), but primarily an
expert local civil service in close touch with and under the control of
a really democratic municipal government. It is difficult to say that
this is bureaucracy or that it is not desirable. Many men who are not
Fabians or Socialists of any kind feel strongly that the breathing of
more vigour and interest into local politics, and the creation of a
proper local civil service, are the great problems of the future.

"The policy of Fabianism has thus been somewhat as follows. An
intellectual circle has sought to permeate all classes, from the top to
the bottom, with a common opinion in favour of social control of
socially created values. Resolved to permeate all classes, it has not
preached class-consciousness; it has worked as much with and through
Liberal 'capitalists' as with and through Labour representatives.
Resolved gradually to permeate, it has not been revolutionary: it has
relied on the slow growth of opinion. Reformist rather than
revolutionary, it has explained the impossibility of the sudden
'revolution' of the working classes against capital: it has urged the
necessity of a gradual amelioration of social conditions by a gradual
assertion of social control over unearned increment.[55] H