One night in the winter of 1879, Lecky dragged Shaw to a meeting of the Zetetical Society, which then met weekly in the rooms of the Woman's Protective and Provident League in Great Queen Street, Long Acre. It will be related elsewhere why Shaw decided to join the society at once; suffice it to say here that he became a frequent attendant upon the meetings of the society, entering actively, if haltingly, into discussion and debate. The importance, in its bearing upon Shaw's subsequent career as a man of affairs and a man of letters, of an acquaintance he formed at this time through the accident of joining the Zetetical Society, can scarcely be overestimated. A few weeks after joining the society Shaw's keenest interest was aroused in a speaker who took part in one of the debates. This speaker was a young man of about twenty-one, rather below middle height, with small, pretty hands and feet, and a profile that suggested, on account of the nose and imperial, an improvement on Napoleon the Third. I well remember the animated way in which Mr. Shaw described to me the man and the occurrence. “He had a fine forehead, a long head, eyes that were built on top of two highly developed organs of speech (according to the phrenologists), and remarkably thick, strong, dark hair. He knew all about the subject of debate; knew more than the lecturer; knew more than anybody present; had read everything that had ever been written on the subject; and remembered all the facts that bore on it. He used notes, read them, ticked them off one by one, threw them away, and finished with a coolness and clearness that, to me in my then trembling state, seemed miraculous. This young man was the ablest man in England—Sidney Webb.” Then a trembling novice, yet subsequently to be known as the cleverest man in England, Shaw to-day does not hesitate to pay full honour to the part Sidney Webb has played in his career. The extent and value of this association will reveal itself in due course. Shaw has said and done a thousand clever things; but, as he once freely confessed to me, “Quite the cleverest thing I ever did in my life was to force my friendship on Webb, to extort his, and keep it.”

After Shaw had been a member of the Zetetical Society for about a year, he joined the Dialectical Society, and was faithful to it for years after it had dwindled into a little group of five or six friends of Dr. Drysdale, the apostle of Malthus. Shaw subsequently joined another debating society, the Bedford, presided over by Stopford Brooke, who had not then given up his pastorate at Bedford Chapel to devote himself exclusively to literature. During these years, as we shall see more particularly in the next chapter, Shaw was slowly perfecting himself in the art of public speaking. The fascination of the platform grew upon him daily. He not only spoke frequently himself, but also attended public meetings of every sort, learning by precept, experience, and example the secrets of the art of platform speaking. With dogged persistence, he was surely, if slowly, acquiring what he himself has called the coolness, the self-confidence and the imperturbability of the statesman.

During these years he had gradually widened and deepened his knowledge of the subjects which periodically came up for discussion in the various debating societies he had joined. In his boyhood he had read Mill on Liberty, on Representative Government, and on the Irish Land Question. And he was fully the equal of his co-debaters in knowledge and comprehension of the evolutionary ideas and theories of Darwin, Tyndall, Huxley, Spencer, George Eliot, and their school. But of political economy he knew absolutely nothing. It was in 1882 that his attention was first definitely directed into the economic channel.

England and Ireland were greatly stirred up at this time by the arrest of Henry George and James Leigh Joynes as “suspicious strangers” in Ireland (August, 1882). Joynes, a master of Eton, wishing to see something of the popular side of the Irish movement, accompanied George as a correspondent of the London Times. George was making an investigation of the situation in Ireland preliminary to his campaign of propaganda in behalf of his Single Tax theories, enunciated in Progress and Poverty. The arrest of George and Joynes, on the charge of being agents of the Fenians, was widely commented on in the newspapers of Great Britain and Ireland, and resulted in a Parliamentary questioning. Progress and Poverty, pronounced by Alfred Russel Wallace “undoubtedly the most remarkable and important work of the nineteenth century,” began to sell by the thousands; it was prominently reviewed in the London Times and dozens of other papers; and George felt at last that he was “beginning to move the world.” Further encouragement came from the Land Nationalization Society, which had been founded in London early in 1882, with Alfred Russel Wallace at its head.[37] “It contained in its membership,” says Mr. Henry George, Jr., in his biography of his father, “those who, like Wallace, desired to take possession of the land by purchase and then have the State exact an annual quit-rent from whoever held it; those who had the Socialistic idea of having the State take possession of the land with or without compensation and then manage it; and those who, with Henry George, repudiated all idea of either compensation or of management, and would recognize common rights to land simply by having the State appropriate its annual value by taxation. Such conflicting elements could not long continue together, and soon those holding the George idea withdrew and organized on their own distinctive lines, giving the name of the Land Reform Union to their organization.” While interest was at fever heat, George was invited by the Land Nationalization Society to lecture under the auspices of a working men's audience in Memorial Hall. The bill, a true copy of which lies before me, reads as follows:

LAND NATIONALIZATION.
Memorial Hall,
Farringdon Street,
On Tuesday, September 5th, 1882.
Under auspices of
THE LAND NATIONALIZATION SOCIETY.
Professor
F. W. Newman
will preside.

George's speech that night was the torch that “kindled the fire in England”—a fire which he afterwards said no human power could put out. It was the masses that George was trying to educate and arouse. It was the masses whose ear he caught that night.