fundamental. The
general effect, it will be perceived, is very much wider and more
various than that suggested by Mr. Ernest Barker's remark that Mill was
our starting point.

It is a curious fact that of the three great propagandist amateurs of
political economy, Henry George, Marx, and Ruskin, Ruskin alone seems to
have had no effect on the Fabians. Here and there in the Socialist
movement workmen turned up who had read Fors Clavigera or Unto This
Last; and some of the more well-to-do no doubt had read the first
chapter of Munera Pulveris. But Ruskin's name was hardly mentioned in
the Fabian Society. My explanation is that, barring Olivier, the Fabians
were inveterate Philistines. My efforts to induce them to publish
Richard Wagner's Art and Revolution, and, later on, Oscar Wilde's The
Soul of Man under Socialism, or even to do justice to Morris's News From
Nowhere, fell so flat that I doubt whether my colleagues were even
conscious of them. Our best excuse must be that as a matter of practical
experience English political societies do good work and present a
dignified appearance whilst they attend seriously to their proper
political business; but, to put it bluntly, they make themselves
ridiculous and attract undesirables when they affect art and philosophy.
The Arts and Crafts exhibitions, the Anti-Scrape (Society for the
Protection of Ancient Buildings), and the Art Workers' Guild, under
Morris and Crane, kept up a very intimate connection between Art and
Socialism; but the maintenance of Fabian friendly relations with them
was left mostly to me and Stewart Headlam. The rest kept aloof and
consoled themselves with the reflection--if they thought about it at
all--that the Utilitarians, though even more Philistine than the
Fabians, were astonishingly effective for their numbers.

It must be added that though the tradition that Socialism excludes the
established creeds was overthrown by the Fabians, and the claim of the
Christian Socialists to rank with the best of us was insisted on
faithfully by them, the Fabian leaders did not break the tradition in
their own practice. The contention of the Anti-Socialist Union that all
Socialists are atheists is no doubt ridiculous in the face of the fact
that the intellectual opposition to Socialism has been led exclusively
by avowed atheists like Charles Bradlaugh or agnostics like Herbert
Spencer, whilst Communism claims Jesus as an exponent; still, if the
question be raised