ked out to a very practicable-looking pitch indeed in
that Bible of Administrative Socialism, the collected tracts of the
Fabian Society,[21] and to that volume I must refer him. The theory of
the minimum standard and the minimum wage is explained, moreover, with
the utmost lucidity in that Socialist classic, _Industrial Democracy_,
by Sidney and Beatrice Webb. It is a theory that must needs be
mastered by every intelligent Socialist, but it is well to bear in
mind that the method of the minimum wage is no integral part of the
general Socialist proposition, and that it still lies open to
discussion and modification.

[21] _Fabian Tracts._ (Fabian Society, 5_s._)

Sec. 2.

Every movement has the defects of its virtues, and it is not, perhaps,
very remarkable that the Fabian Society of the eighties and nineties,
having introduced the conception of the historical continuity of
institutions into the Propaganda of Socialism, did certainly for a
time greatly over-accentuate that conception and draw away attention
from aspects that may be ultimately more essential.

Beginning with the proposition that the institutions and formulae of
the future must necessarily be developed from those of the present,
that one cannot start _de novo_ even after a revolution; one may
easily end in an attitude of excessive conservatism towards existing
machinery. In spite of the presence of such fine and original
intelligences as Mr. (now Sir) Sydney Olivier and Mr. Graham Wallas in
the Fabian counsels, there can be no denial that for the first twenty
years of its career, Mr. Webb was the prevailing Fabian. Now his is a
mind legal as well as creative, and at times his legal side quite
overcomes his constructive element; he is extraordinarily fertile in
expedients and skilful in adaptation, and with a real horror of open
destruction. This statement by no means exhausts him, but it does to a
large extent convey the qualities that were uppermost in the earlier
years, at any rate, of his influence. His insistence upon continuity
pervaded the Society, was re-echoed and intensified by others, and
developed into something like a mania for achieving Socialism without
the overt change of any existing ruling body. His impetus carried this
reaction against the crude democratic idea to its extremest opposite.
Then arose Webbites to caricature Webb. From saying that the
unorganized people cannot achieve Socialism, they passed to the
implication that