thing.

[53] See "Socialism and Superior Brains: a reply to Mr. Mallock," by
G.B. Shaw. Fabian Tract 146.

[54] Mr. Barker emphasises the "discrimination advocated by the Fabians"
in favour of profits in a later passage (p. 224) not here quoted.

[55] This should read "incomes."

[56] "Faults of the Fabian," p. 9.

[57] See Appendix I. B.

Appendix I

Memoranda by Bernard Shaw

Bernard Shaw has been good enough to write the following memoranda on
Chapter XII. For various reasons I prefer to leave that chapter as it
stands; but the memoranda have an interest of their own and I therefore
print them here.

A

ON THE HISTORY OF FABIAN ECONOMICS

Mr. Barker's guesses greatly underrate the number of tributaries which
enlarged the trickle of Socialist thought into a mighty river. They also
shew how quickly waves of thought are forgotten. Far from being the
economic apostle of Socialism, Mill, in the days when the Fabian Society
took the field, was regarded as the standard authority for solving the
social problem by a combination of peasant proprietorship with
neo-Malthusianism. The Dialectical Society, which was a centre of the
most advanced thought in London until the Fabian Society supplanted it,
was founded to advocate the principles of Mill's Essay on Liberty, which
was much more the Bible of English Individualism than Das Kapital ever
was of English Socialism. As late as 1888 Henry Sidgwick, a follower of
Mill, rose indignantly at the meeting of the British Association in
Bath, to which I had just read the paper on The Transition to
Social-Democracy, which was subsequently published; as one of the
Fabian Essays, and declared that I had advocated nationalisation of
land; that nationalisation of land was a crime; and that he would not
take part in a discussion of a criminal proposal. With that he left the
platform, all the more impressively as his apparently mild and judicial
temperament made the incident so unexpected that his friends who had not
actually witnessed it were with difficulty persuaded that it had really
happened. It illustrates the entire failure of Mill up to that date to
undo the individualistic teaching of the earlier volumes of his
Political Economy by the Socialist conclusions to which his work on the
treatise led him at the end. Sidney Webb astonished and confounded our
Individualist opponents by citing Mill against them; and it is probably
due to Webb more than to any other dis