In general, it may be said that the Fabians, while strenuously avowing themselves strict evolutionists, are in reality highly revolutionary. The boast of the Fabian Society is freedom from the illusions and millennial aspirations of the great mass of Socialists. It is a society of irreverence and scientific iconoclasm, bowing to the fetishism neither of George nor of Marx. Towards Marx and Lassalle, some of whose views must now be discarded as erroneous or obsolete, the Fabian Society insists on the necessity of maintaining as critical an attitude as these eminent Socialists themselves maintained towards their predecessors St. Simon and Robert Owen. In origin anarchistic and revolutionary as could be desired, in spirit the Fabians remain anarchistic and revolutionary. In principle avowedly orderly and constitutional, in policy frankly opportunist, in practice strictly scientific and economic, the Fabians may be called the realists of the Socialist movement. They have ruthlessly snatched the masks from the faces of the Utopian dreamers and romancers.[87] While the rank and file of the “S. D. F.” have been the very good friends of the Fabians, the radical differences in their respective policies have precluded all possibility of amalgamation. As succinctly stated by Shaw: “The Fabian Society is a society for helping to bring about the socialization of the industrial resources of the country. The Social-Democratic Federation is a society for enlisting the whole proletariat of the country in its own ranks and itself socializing the national industry.” The policy of the one is fundamentally opportunist; of the other, implacably sectarian. The Federation counts no man a Socialist until he has joined it, and supports no man who is not a member; the Fabians advise concentration of strength to elect that candidate, be he Socialist or not, who gives the greatest promise of advancing, in greater or less degree, the general cause of Socialism. The Federation persistently claims to be the only genuine representative of working-class interests in England; the Fabians have never advanced the smallest pretensions in that direction. Its policy finds ample justification in the recent history of Continental Socialism. The tactics of the German Socialist Party, in the last few years, have been “Fabianized” by sheer force of circumstances; to-day, this party is, in great measure, both opportunist and constitutional, the two essential features of Fabian policy. Sharpened in wit by rigorous persecution, Liebknecht and his successor Bebel have learned the art of politics through experience and exigency. In contemporary France is witnessed the signal triumph of Fabian Socialism. The policy of Jaurès, although under the frown of the “International,” will be continued in France; and Guèsde, despite his barren victory at the International Socialist Congress at Amsterdam in 1904, will remain only vox clamantis in deserto. The history of the Fabian Society, which is the history of Shaw, in the last twenty years, bears evidence that the Fabians have stood in the very forefront of the battle for collectivist measures, municipal reforms, civic virtue and social progress. As Shaw wrote in 1900:

Strangely enough, in view of all the facts, it is customary to regard Shaw as a purely destructive and negative spirit. The truth is that Shaw stands for certain definite beliefs, certain undoubted principles. His is the belief of the unbeliever, the principle of the unprincipled, the faith of the sceptic.

Not less important than his destructive achievements has been his constructive work in practical affairs as Vestryman and Borough Councillor. Prior to 1895, roughly speaking, the vestries were ignorantly boasted of as the truest products of a representative democratic government. “The truth of the matter,” Mr. Shaw once remarked to me, “is that the vestry, as it was actually elected in those days—a few people getting together when nobody knew of it and at some place of which the public was not notified, and electing themselves members—could scarcely be called a representative democratic body. We Socialists finally began to realize that the way to get at the vestry was to put a programme into their hands. So we sent them all a pamphlet, requesting replies—a pamphlet entitled, 'Questions for Vestrymen,' or something of the sort. The vestrymen were thus forced to the wall and driven to decide upon issues. They actually began to make up their minds on many subjects of which hitherto they had had no conception. Slowly the vestries, under this discipline, began to take on a truly representative character. The personnel of the vestry was now permanently altered for the better. Men were elected who not only took an interest in municipal affairs, but likewise were willing to do any amount of hard work. I was 'co-opted'—i.e., chosen by the committee, by agreement with the opposite party, obviously beaten if a vote were taken. So that I was fortunate enough to escape the terrors of a popular election.”

It is quite beyond the scope of this book to enter into the details of Shaw's work as Vestryman, afterwards Borough Councillor. Suffice it to say, that he was chosen in 1897, entered at once upon the performance of his duties, and prosecuted them for several terms with great zeal and tireless energy. His various letters to the Press during that period, and occasional reminiscences, show that he was always outspoken and vehement in behalf of all reforms which tended to the betterment of the poorer classes, equalization of public privileges of men and women, better sanitary conditions, and the municipalization of such industries as promise to give the people at large better service and greater value for their money than privately operated concerns. The most tangible result of his work as Vestryman and Borough Councillor is his book, Municipal Trading, which he once told me he regarded as one of the best and most useful things he had ever done.[89]

At the expiration of his career as Borough Councillor, he stood as the candidate for the Borough of St. Pancras in the London County Council—the seat afterwards occupied by the well-known actor, Mr. George Alexander. “I was beaten,” Mr. Shaw recently told me, “because I alienated the Nonconformist element by favouring the improvement of the Church schools. I was convinced that such improvement would lead to the betterment of the education of the children. The Nonconformists were enraged beyond measure by the proposal, looking with the utmost horror upon any measure which tended to strengthen the Church. I remember one rabid Nonconformist coming to me one day, almost foaming at the mouth, and protesting with violent indignation that he would not pay a single cent towards the maintenance of the schools of the Established Church. 'Why, my dear fellow,' I replied, 'don't you know that you pay taxes now for the support of the Roman Catholic Church in the Island of Malta?' Although this staggered the irate Nonconformist for the moment, it did not reconcile his element to the extension of the principle to London. My contention was that under the conditions prevailing at the time, the children were poorly taught and poorly housed, the schools badly ventilated, and the conditions generally unsatisfactory. 'Improve all the conditions,' I said; 'appoint your own inspectors, and in the course of time you will control the situation. Pay the piper and you can call the tune.' But I could not override the tremendous prejudice against the Church, and I was badly beaten.” One of Shaw's intimate friends told me not long ago that what lost the seat in the L. C. C. for Shaw was his intrepid assertion, repeated throughout the campaign, that he and Voltaire were the only two truly religious people who had ever lived! Shaw's own account of this, when I taxed him with it, was that he had often pointed out that the religious opinions of the Free Churches (the Nonconformist sects) in England to-day were exactly those of Voltaire, and that what I had been told was quite as near his meaning as most people contrived to get without reading him. And only the other day a well-known politician and a friend of Shaw's made the remark to me that Shaw was an “impossible political candidate,” too rash and individualistic in his assertions to avoid alienating many people—even some of the very men who under ordinary circumstances might confidently be relied upon to support a progressive and energetic reformer.

And yet it is noteworthy that as far back as the year 1889 Shaw was asked to stand as a Member of Parliament. Below is given the text of a letter, from Shaw, at 29, Fitzroy Square, W., London, dated March 23rd, 1889, to Mr. W. Sanders, then Secretary of the Election Committee of the Battersea branch of the S. D. F., now a prominent Fabian and recently member of the London County Council. This letter, a copy of which was most kindly given me by Mr. Sanders, was sent in reply to a letter from him to Mr. Shaw asking him to allow his name to be put forward as a candidate for the parliamentary representation of Battersea subsequent to a conference between the Battersea L. and R. Association and the Battersea branch of the S. D. F. Mr. Shaw was mistaken in addressing Mr. Sanders as the Secretary of the Election Committee of the Battersea L. and R. Association.

In many quarters, even among his Socialist confrères, Bernard Shaw is regarded as primarily destructive in his proposals. And yet, at different times and in various places, he has constructively outlined his programme of complete Socialism. In essential agreement with such Collectivists as Émile Vandervelde, Jean Jaurès and August Bebel, Shaw differs from them only in regard to the successive mutations in the process of Socialist evolution. The gradual extension of the principle of the income tax—e.g., a “forcible transfer of rent, interest, and even rent of ability from private holders to the State, without compensation,” is the scheme of capitalistic expropriation the Collectivists have in mind. By a gradual process of development, the imposition of gradually increased taxes, the State will secure the means for investment in industrial enterprises of all sorts. Instead of forcibly extinguishing private enterprises, the State would extinguish them by successfully competing against them. Thus, as Proudhon said, competition would kill competition; in America, Mr. Gaylord Wilshire never tires of exclaiming: “Let the Nation own the Trusts.” If, as Shaw claims, the highest exceptional talent could be had, in the open market, for eight hundred pounds, say, nearly half the existing wages of ability and the entire profits of capital would be diverted from the pockets of the able men and the present possessors of capital, and would find its way into the pockets of the State. The vast sum thus accruing to the State would swell the existing wages fund, and would be employed in raising the wages of the entire community. After the means of production have been Socialized, and the State has become the employer, products or riches will be distributed roughly, “according to the labour done by each man in the collective search for them.” In his celebrated tilt with Shaw, Mr. W. H. Mallock attacked the validity of the economics which furnish the substructure of Fabian Essays.[90] Mr. Mallock's contention resolves itself into the assertion that exceptional personal ability, and not labour, is the main factor in the production of wealth. Far from repudiating this assertion, Shaw embraced it, he said, in the spirit of Mrs. Prig: “Who deniges of it, Betsy?” We support and encourage ability, Shaw contends, in order that we may get as much as possible out of it, not in order that it may get as much as possible out of us. Give men of ability and their heirs the entire product of their ability, so that they shall be enormously rich whilst the rest of us remain as poor as if they had never existed, and “it will become a public duty to kill them, since nobody but themselves will be any the worse, and we shall be much the better for having no further daily provocation to the sin of envy.” Accordingly, the business of Society is “to get the use of ability as cheaply as it can for the benefit of the community, giving the able man just enough advantage to keep his ability active and efficient. From the Unsocialist point of view this is simply saying that it is the business of Society to find out exactly how far it can rob the able man of the product of his ability without injuring itself, which is precisely true (from that point of view),” though whether it is a “reduction of Socialism to dishonesty or of Unsocialism to absurdity” may be left an open question. “If Mr. Mallock will take his grand total of the earnings of Ability,” Shaw asserts, “and strike off from it, first, all rent of land and interest on capital, then all normal profits, then all non-competitive emoluments attached to a definite status in the public service, civil or military, from royalty downwards, then all payments for the advantages of secondary or technical education and social opportunities, then all fancy payments made to artists and other professional men by very rich commonplace people competing for their services, and then all exceptional payments made to men whose pre-eminence exists only in the imaginative ignorance of the public, the remainder may with some plausibility stand as genuine rent of ability.” And to Mr. Mallock's assertion that “men of ability will not exert themselves to produce income when they know that the State is an organized conspiracy to rob them of it,” Shaw characteristically retorts, “Mr. Mallock might as well deny the existence of the Pyramids on the general ground that men will not build pyramids when they know that Pharaoh is at the head of an organized conspiracy to take away the Pyramids from them as soon as they are made.”

Shaw holds the fundamentally sound view that “as to the entire assimilation of Socialism by the world, the world has never yet assimilated the whole of any ism, and never will.” In that most subtle and distinguished of all his contributions to the Socialist literature of our time, The Illusions of Socialism, Shaw has expressed his firm conviction that it is not essential for the welfare of the world to carry out Socialism in its entirety. Unfettered by the dogmas of a political creed, unhampered by the bonds of a narrow partisanship, Bernard Shaw stands forth as a great and free spirit in his prophetic declaration that, long before it has penetrated to all corners of the political and social organization, Socialism will have relieved the pressure to which it owes its elasticity, and will recede before the next great social movement, leaving everywhere intact the best survivals of individualistic liberalism. And far from agreeing with Ibsen in his impossibilist declaration that the State must go, Shaw not only asserts that we must put up with the State, but also expresses no doubt whatsoever that under Social-Democracy the few will still govern. It is a mark of Shaw's British practicality and clear-sightedness that he recognizes in the State a practical instrumentality for effecting and directing social reform. The State is indispensable as a means for making possible one great consummation: the development of the strong, sound, creative personality. The unsocial man he regards as a “hopelessly private person.” The opportunity for the free development of the individual he regards as the fundamental prerequisite and condition for the individual's social and material well-being.[91] “That great joint-stock company of the future, the Social-Democratic State, will have its chairman and directors as surely as its ships will have captains.” But this admission involves no endorsement, on Shaw's part, of the State as at present constituted, “Bakounine's comprehensive aspiration to destroy all States and Established Churches, with their religious, political, judicial, financial, criminal, academic, economic and social laws and institutions, seems to me perfectly justifiable and intelligible from the point of view of the ordinary 'educated man,' who believes that institutions make men instead of men making institutions.” The State, as at present constituted, Shaw views as simply a huge machine for robbing and slave-driving the poor by brute force. While he laughs at the Individualism expressed in Herbert Spencer's The Coming Slavery, at the Anarchy expressed in the word Liberty, and in those “silly words” of John Hay on the title-page of Benjamin Tucker's paper, Shaw is, nevertheless, both an individualist and an intellectual anarchist. The alleged opposition between Socialism and Individualism, Shaw has always strenuously maintained, is false and question-begging. “The true issue lies between Socialism and Unsocialism, and not between Socialism and that instinct in us that leads us to Socialism by its rebellion against the squalid levelling down, the brutal repression, the regimenting and drilling and conventionalizing of the great mass of us to-day, in order that a lucky handful may bore themselves to death for want of anything to do, and be afraid to walk down Bond Street without a regulation hat and coat on.” Like Ruskin, Morris and Kropotkin, Shaw sees the whole imposture through and through, “in spite of its familiarity, and of the illusions created by its temporal power, its riches, its splendour, its prestige, its intense respectability, its unremitting piety, and its high moral pretension.”

At bottom, it was a deeply religious, a fundamentally humanitarian motive, which drew Shaw into Socialism. The birth of the social passion in his soul finds its origin in the individual desire to compass the salvation of his fellow man. A burning sense of social injustice, a great passion for social reform, directed his steps. In his inmost being he felt his complicity in the social ills of the world. He realized that only by personally seeking to effect the salvation of society could he achieve the salvation of his own soul. The Will to Socialism was thus grounded in a profound individualism: he felt their organic connection. Socialism was the need of the age; and it could only be achieved through the freedom and development of the individual.

That other wit and paradoxer, Mr. Gilbert Chesterton, told the very truth itself when he said that Bernard Shaw “has done something that has never been done in the world before. He has become a revolutionist without becoming a sentimentalist. He has revolted against the cant of authority, and yet continued in despising the cant of revolt.” To Shaw, the middle-class origin of the Socialist movement is in nothing so apparent as in the persistent delusions of Socialists as to an ideal proletariat, forced by the brutalities of the capitalist into an unwilling acquiescence in war, penal codes, and other cruelties of civilization. “They still see the social problem,” Shaw wittily remarks, “not sanely and objectively, but imaginatively, as the plot of a melodrama, with its villain and its heroine, its innocent beginning, troubled middle, and happy ending. They are still the children and the romancers of politics.”[92]

Shaw finds a sort of sly gratification in the reflection that the world is becoming so familiar with the Socialist, that it no longer fears, but only laughs at him. “I, the Socialist, am no longer a Red Spectre. I am only a ridiculous fellow. Good: I embrace the change. It puts the world with me.... All human progress involves, as its first condition, the willingness of the pioneer to make a fool of himself. The sensible man is the man who adapts himself to existing conditions. The fool is the man who persists in trying to adapt the conditions to himself. Both extremes have their disadvantages. I cling to my waning folly as a corrective to my waxing good sense as anxiously as I once nursed my good sense to defend myself against my folly.” Shaw is the very man of whom his own Don Juan said: “He can only be enslaved whilst he is spiritually weak enough to listen to reason.”