as to whether any of the Fabian Essayists attended an
established place of worship regularly, the reply must be in the
negative. Indeed, they were generally preaching themselves on Sundays.
To describe them as irreligious in view of their work would be silly;
but until Hubert Bland towards the end of his life took refuge in the
Catholic Church, and Mrs. Besant devoted herself to Theosophy, no
leading Fabian found a refuge for his soul in the temples of any
established denomination. I may go further and admit that the first
problems the Fabians had to solve were so completely on the materialist
plane that the atmosphere inevitably became uncongenial to those whose
capacity was wasted and whose sympathies were starved on that plane.
Even psychical research, with which Pease and Podmore varied their
Fabian activities, tended fatally towards the exposure of alleged
psychical phenomena as physical tricks. The work that came to our hands
in our first two decades was materialistic work; and it was not until
the turn of the century brought us the Suffrage movement and the Wells
raid, that the materialistic atmosphere gave way, and the Society began
to retain recruits of a kind that it always lost in the earlier years as
it lost Mrs. Besant and (virtually) William Clarke. It is certainly
perceptibly less hard-headed than it was in its first period.

B

ON GUILD SOCIALISM

Here I venture to say, with some confidence, that Mr. Barker is
mistaken. That storm has burst on the Fabian Society and has left it
just where it was. Guild Socialism, championed by the ablest and most
industrious insurgents of the rising generation in the Society, raised
its issue with Collectivism only to discover, when the matter, after a
long agitation, was finally thrashed out at a conference at Barrow
House, that the issue was an imaginary one, and that Collectivism lost
nothing by the fullest tenable concessions to the Guild Socialists. A
very brief consideration will shew that this was inevitable.

Guild Socialism, in spite of its engaging medieval name, means nothing
more picturesque than a claim that under Socialism each industry shall
be controlled by its own operators, as the professions are to-day. This
by itself would not imply Socialism at all: it would be merely a revival
of the medieval guild, or a fresh attempt at the now exploded
self-governing workshop of the primitive co-operators. Guild Socialism,
with the emphasis on the Socialism