been maintained by worshippers, and even in our own day the
followers of Marx have held together partly because they regard his
teachings with the uncritical reverence usually accorded to the prophets
of new faiths. But Marxism has survived in Germany chiefly because it
has created and inspired a political party, and political parties are of
a different order from propagandist societies. Socialism in England has
not yet created a political party; for the Labour Party, though entirely
Socialist in policy, is not so in name or in creed, and in this matter
the form counts rather than the fact.

Europe, as I write in the early days of 1916, is in the melting-pot, and
it would be foolish to prophesy either the fate of the nations now at
war or, in particular, the future of political parties in Great Britain,
and especially of the Labour Party.

But so far as concerns the Fabian Society and the two other Socialist
Societies, this much may be said: three factors in the past have kept
them apart: differences of temperament; differences of policy;
differences of leadership. In fact perhaps the last was the strongest.

I do not mean that the founders of the three societies entertained
mutual antipathies or personal jealousies to the detriment of the
movement. I do mean that each group preferred to go its own way, and saw
no sufficient advantage in a common path to compensate for the
difficulties of selecting it.

In a former chapter I have explained how a movement for a form of
Socialist Unity had at last almost achieved success, when a new factor,
the European War, interposed. After the war these negotiations will
doubtless be resumed, and the three Socialist Societies will find
themselves more closely allied than ever before. The differences of
policy which have divided them will then be a matter of past history.
The differences of temperament matter less and less as the general
policy becomes fixed, and in a few years the old leaders from whose
disputes the general policy emerged must all have left the stage. The
younger men inherit an established platform and know nothing of the
old-time quarrels and distrusts. They will come together more easily. If
the organised propaganda of Socialism continues--and that perhaps is not
a matter of certainty--it seems to me improbable that it will be carried
on for long by three separate societies. In some way or other, in
England as in so many other countries, a United Socialist organi