The History of the Fabian Society | Page 4

essays, was
turning to ridicule the simple-minded credulity of Gladstone and his
contemporaries. Our parents, who read neither Spencer nor Huxley,
lived in an intellectual world which bore no relation to our own; and
cut adrift as we were from the intellectual moorings of our upbringings,
recognising, as we did, that the older men were useless as guides in
religion, in science, in philosophy because they knew not evolution, we
also felt instinctively that we could accept nothing on trust from those
who still believed that the early chapters of Genesis accurately
described the origin of the universe, and that we had to discover
somewhere for ourselves what were the true principles of the then
recently invented science of sociology.
One man there was who professed to offer us an answer, Auguste
Comte. He too was pre-Darwinian, but his philosophy accepted science,
future as well as past. John Stuart Mill, whose word on his own
subjects was then almost law, wrote of him with respectful admiration.
His followers were known to number amongst them some of the ablest
thinkers of the day. The "Religion of Humanity" offered solutions for
all the problems that faced us. It suggested a new heaven, of a sort, and
it proposed a new earth, free from all the inequalities of wealth, the
preventable suffering, the reckless waste of effort, which we saw
around us. At any rate, it was worth examination; and most of the
free-thinking men of that period read the "Positive Polity" and the other
writings of the founder, and spent some Sunday mornings at the little
conventicle in Lamb's Conduit Street, or attended on Sunday evenings

the Newton Hall lectures of Frederic Harrison.
Few could long endure the absurdities of a made-up theology and a
make-believe religion: and the Utopia designed by Comte was as
impracticable and unattractive as Utopias generally are. But the critical
and destructive part of the case was sound enough. Here was a man
who challenged the existing order of society and pronounced it wrong.
It was in his view based on conventions, on superstitions, on
regulations which were all out of date; society should be reorganised in
the light of pure reason; the anarchy of competition must be brought to
an end; mankind should recognise that order, good sense, science, and,
he added, religion freed from superstition, could turn the world into a
place where all might live together in comfort and happiness.
Positivism proposed to attain its Utopia by moralising the capitalists,
and herein it showed no advance on Christianity, which for nineteen
centuries had in vain preached social obligation to the rich. The new
creed could not succeed where the old, with all its tremendous
sanctions, had completely failed. We wanted something fresh, some
new method of dealing with the inequalities of wealth.
Emile de Lavelaye was quite correct in attributing significance to the
publication of "Progress and Poverty," though the seed sown by Henry
George took root, not in the slums and alleys of our cities--no
intellectual seed of any sort can germinate in the sickly, sunless
atmosphere of slums--but in the minds of people who had sufficient
leisure and education to think of other things than breadwinning. Henry
George proposed to abolish poverty by political action: that was the
new gospel which came from San Francisco in the early eighties.
"Progress and Poverty" was published in America in 1879, and its
author visited England at the end of 1881. Socialism hardly existed at
that time in English-speaking countries, but the early advocates of land
taxation were not then, as they usually are now, uncompromising
individualists. "Progress and Poverty" gave an extraordinary impetus to
the political thought of the time. It proposed to redress the wrongs
suffered by the working classes as a whole: the poverty it considered
was the poverty of the wage workers as a class, not the destitution of

the unfortunate and downtrodden individuals. It did not merely propose,
like philanthropy and the Poor Law, to relieve the acute suffering of the
outcasts of civilisation, those condemned to wretchedness by the
incapacity, the vice, the folly, or the sheer misfortune of themselves or
their relations. It suggested a method by which wealth would
correspond approximately with worth; by which the reward of labour
would go to those that laboured; the idleness alike of rich and poor
would cease; the abundant wealth created by modern industry would be
distributed with something like fairness and even equality, amongst
those who contributed to its production. Above all, this tremendous
revolution was to be accomplished by a political method, applicable by
a majority of the voters, and capable of being drafted as an Act of
Parliament by any competent lawyer.
To George belongs the extraordinary merit of recognising the right way
of social salvation. The Socialists of