ot serious. Our
preference for practical suggestions and criticisms, and our
impatience of all general expressions of sympathy with working-class
aspirations, not to mention our way of chaffing our opponents in
preference to denouncing them as enemies of the human race, repelled
from us some warm-hearted and eloquent Socialists, to whom it seemed
callous and cynical to be even commonly self-possessed in the
presence of the sufferings upon which Socialists make war. But there
was far too much equality and personal intimacy among the Fabians to
allow of any member presuming to get up and preach at the rest in the
fashion which the working-classes still tolerate submissively from
their leaders. We knew that a certain sort of oratory was useful for
'stoking up' public meetings; but we needed no stoking up, and, when
any orator tried the process on us, soon made him understand that he
was wasting his time and ours. I, for one, should be very sorry to
lower the intellectual standard of the Fabian by making the
atmosphere of its public discussions the least bit more congenial to
stale declamation than it is at present. If our debates are to be
kept wholesome, they cannot be too irreverent or too critical. And
the irreverence, which has become traditional with us, comes down
from those early days when we often talked such nonsense that we
could not help laughing at ourselves.

"TORY GOLD AT THE 1885 ELECTION.

"When I add that in 1885 we had only 40 members, you will be able to
form a sufficient notion of the Fabian Society in its nonage. In that
year there occurred an event which developed the latent differences
between ourselves and the Social-Democratic Federation. The
Federation said then, as it still says, that its policy is founded on
a recognition of the existence of a Class War. How far the fact of
the working classes being at war with the proprietary classes
justifies them in suspending the observance of the ordinary social
obligations in dealing with them was never settled; but at that time
we were decidedly less scrupulous than we are now in our ideas on the
subject; and we all said freely that as gunpowder destroyed the
feudal system, so the capitalist system could not long survive the
invention of dynamite. Not that we are dynamitards: indeed the
absurdity of the inference shows how innocent we were of any