concerned itself only with the material reorganization
of Society and its social consequences, with economic changes and the
reaction of these changes on administrative work; it has either
accepted existing intellectual conditions and political institutions
as beyond its control or assumed that they will obediently modify as
economic and administrative necessity dictates. Declare the Social
revolution, we were told in a note of cheery optimism by the Marxist
apostles, and political institutions will come like flowers in May!
Achieve your expropriation, said the early Fabians, get your network
of skilled experts spread over the country, and your political forms,
your public opinion, your collective soul will not trouble you.

The student of history knows better. These confident claims ignore the
psychological factors in government and human association; they
disregard a jungle of difficulties that lie directly in our way.
Socialists have to face the facts; firstly, that the political and
intellectual institutions of the present time belong to the present
condition of things, and that the intellectual methods, machinery and
political institutions of the better future must almost inevitably be of
a very different type; secondly, that such institutions will not come
about of themselves--which indeed is the old superstition of _laissez
faire_ in a new form--but must be thought out, planned and organized
just as completely as economic socialization has had to be planned and
organized; and thirdly, that so far Socialism has evolved scarcely any
generalizations even, that may be made the basis of new intellectual and
governmental--as distinguished from administrative--methods. It has
preached collective ownership and collective control, and it has only
begun to recognize that this implies the necessity of a collective will
and new means and methods altogether for the collective mind.

The administrative Socialism which Mr. Webb and the Fabian Society
developed upon a modification of the broad generalizations of the Marx
phase, is as it were no more than the first courses above those
foundations of Socialism. It supplies us with a conception of methods
of transition and with a vision of a great and disciplined
organization of officials, a scientific bureaucracy appointed by
representative bodies of diminishing activity and importance, and
coming to be at last the real working control of the Socialist State.
But it says nothing