The History of the Fabian Society | Page 3

respectable people were wise to
ignore.
In the monthly reviews we find the same odd mixture of articles
apposite to present problems, and articles utterly out of date. The
organisation of agriculture is a perennial, and Lady Verney's "Peasant
Proprietorship in France" ("Contemporary," January, 1882), Mr. John
Rae's "Co-operative Agriculture in Germany" ("Contemporary," March,
1882), and Professor Sedley Taylor's "Profit-Sharing in Agriculture"
("Nineteenth Century," October, 1882) show that change in the
methods of exploiting the soil is leaden-footed and lagging.
Problems of another class, centring round "the Family," present much
the same aspect now as they did thirty years ago. In his "Infant
Mortality and Married Women in Factories," Professor Stanley Jevons
("Contemporary," January, 1882) proposes that mothers of children
under three years of age should be excluded from factories, and we are
at present perhaps even farther from general agreement whether any
measure on these lines ought to be adopted.
But when we read the articles on Socialism--more numerous than might
be expected at that early date--we are in another world. Mr. Samuel
Smith, M.P., writing on "Social Reform" in the "Nineteenth Century"
for May, 1883, says that: "Our country is still comparatively free from
Communism and Nihilism and similar destructive movements, but who
can tell how long this will continue? We have a festering mass of
human wretchedness in all our great towns, which is the natural hotbed
of such anarchical movements: all the great continental countries are
full of this explosive material. Can we depend on our country keeping
free from the infection when we have far more poverty in our midst
than the neighbouring European States?" Emigration and temperance
reform, he thinks, may avert the danger.
The Rev. Samuel (later Canon) Barnett in the same review a month

earlier advocated Free Libraries and graduated taxation to pay for free
education, under the title of "Practicable Socialism." In April, 1883,
Emile de Lavelaye described with alarm the "Progress of Socialism."
"On the Continent," he wrote, "Socialism is said to be everywhere." To
it he attributed with remarkable inaccuracy, the agrarian movement in
Ireland, and with it he connected the fact that Henry George's new book,
"Progress and Poverty," was selling by thousands "in an ultra popular
form" in the back streets and alleys of England. And then he goes on to
allude to Prince Bismarck's "abominable proposition to create a fund
for pensioning invalid workmen by a monopoly of tobacco"!
Thirty years ago politics were only intermittently concerned with social
problems. On the whole the view prevailed, at any rate amongst the
leaders, that Government should interfere in such matters as little as
possible. Pauperism was still to be stamped out by ruthless deterrence:
education had been only recently and reluctantly taken in hand: factory
inspection alone was an accepted State function. Lord Beaconsfield
was dead and he had forgotten his zeal for social justice long before he
attained power. Gladstone, then in the zenith of his fame, never took
any real interest in social questions as we now understand them. Lord
Salisbury was an aristocrat and thought as an aristocrat. John Bright
viewed industrial life from the standpoint of a Lancashire mill-owner.
William Edward Forster, the creator of national education, a Chartist in
his youth, had become the gaoler of Parnell and the protagonist of
coercion in Ireland. Joseph Chamberlain alone seemed to realise the
significance of the social problem, and unhappily political events were
soon to deflect his career from what then seemed to be its appointed
course.
The political parties therefore offered very little attraction to the young
men of the early eighties, who, viewing our social system with the fresh
eyes of youth, saw its cruelties and its absurdities and judged them, not
as older men, by comparison with the worse cruelties and greater
absurdities of earlier days, but by the standard of common fairness and
common sense, as set out in the lessons they had learned in their
schools, their universities, and their churches.

It is nowadays not easy to recollect how wide was the intellectual gulf
which separated the young generation of that period from their parents.
"The Origin of Species," published in 1859, inaugurated an intellectual
revolution such as the world had not known since Luther nailed his
Theses to the door of All Saints' Church at Wittenberg. The older folk
as a rule refused to accept or to consider the new doctrine. I recollect a
botanical Fellow of the Royal Society who, in 1875, told me that he
had no opinions on Darwin's hypothesis. The young men of the time I
am describing grew up with the new ideas and accepted them as a
matter of course. Herbert Spencer, then deemed the greatest of English
thinkers, was pointing out in portentous phraseology the enormous
significance of Evolution. Professor Huxley, in brilliant