[66] Letter to Hamlin Garland, as Chairman of the Committee, the Progress and Poverty dinner, New York, January 24th, 1905. The letter, dated December, 1904, was kindly lent me by Mr. Henry George, Jr.

[67] In the early eighties the monthly magazine To-Day was purchased by three Socialists: Henry Hyde Champion, Percy Frost and James Leigh Joynes. Mr. Wicksteed's article, entitled Das Kapital: a Criticism, appeared in To-Day, New Series, Vol. II., pages 388-409, 1884; publishers, The Modern Press, a printing business conducted by Messrs. H. H. Champion and J. C. Foulger.

[68] This article appeared in To-Day, New Series, Vol. III., pages 22-26, 1885.

[69] The leading members of this club were Beeton, Wicksteed, Foxwell, Graham Wallas, F. Y. Edgeworth, Alfred Marshall, Edward Cunningham, Charles Wright and Armitage Smith. The club met monthly—from November to June—during the years 1884 to 1889 inclusive, when it came to an end through the formation of what was formally entitled The Economic Club, organized mainly at the instance of Alfred Marshall. It may be worthy of mention that Wicksteed dedicated his Alphabet of Economics to this club. Shaw joined the club because he wanted to learn abstract economics, and he occasionally contributed something to the programme himself. On November 9th, 1886, for example, he read a paper before the society on the subject of Interest.

[70] As late as 1905 Mr. E. Belfort Bax is found maintaining that Jevons was the mere tool of capitalism, seeking to undermine the Marxian theory of value in the interests of social order and political stability. Compare his article, Socialism and Bourgeois Culture, in Wilshire's Magazine, 1905.

[71] This Shaw achieved with great success in his review, in three parts, of Das Kapital, English translation, which appeared in the National Reformer.

[72] The National Reformer, now extinct, then the weekly organ of the National Secular Society, editors, Charles Bradlaugh and Annie Besant; policy, Atheism, Malthusianism and Republicanism. These articles, three in number, under the general heading Karl Marx and 'Das Kapital,' appeared in Vol. I., pages 84-86, 106-108, 117, 118. On receiving a cheque for these articles at a rate which he felt sure the National Reformer could not afford, Shaw found that the beneficent Mrs. Besant had made a contribution from her private purse, which Shaw characteristically hurled back with indignant gratitude.

[73] These ideas seem to have found expression simultaneously in England and Austria. Compare The Theory of Political Economy, by W. S. Jevons, London, 1871; Grundsätze der Volkswirtschaftslehre, by Anton Menger, Vienna, 1871.

[74] The question of the validity of the Marxian theory is not now a live subject in England. Mr. Hyndman's defence of the Marxian position is to be found in his Economics of Socialism, in which he attempts to demonstrate the “final futility of final utility.” It is still a mooted question on the Continent; compare, for example, the works of Böhm-Bawerk, perhaps the most eminent of the “Austrian School” of political economists.

[75] These conclusions were reached before the third volume of Capital appeared. The editor of the first volume, Mr. Frederick Engels, promised that the third volume, when it appeared, would reconcile these and other seeming contradictions. Marx does seem to have modified certain of his theories in the third volume.

[76] In the Pall Mall Gazette the following articles appeared: Marx and Modern Socialism, by Shaw, May 7th, 1887, page 3; Hyndman's reply, May 11th, page 11; Shaw's rejoinder—Socialists at Home (this heading doubtless a jibe of the editor), May 12th, page 11; Hyndman's rejoinder, May 16th, page 2; Mrs. Besant's article on the same subject, May 24th, page 2. In To-Day, Vol. XI., New Series, 1889, appeared: An Economic Eirenicon, by Graham Wallas, pages 80-86; Marx's Theory of Value, by Hyndman, same volume, pages 94-104; Shaw's reply, Bluffing the Value Theory, following Hyndman, May, 1889, pages 128-135, was lately reprinted by Eduard Bernstein in Sozialistische Monatshefte. Shaw's letter in Justice appeared on page 3 of the issue of July 20th, 1889. The fine essay, entitled The Illusions of Socialism, quite penetrating in its psychology, although caviare to the ordinary reviewer, originally appeared in German in Die Zeit (Vienna), in 1896: No. 108, October 24th, and No. 109, October 31st; later it appeared in English in Forecasts of the Coming Century, edited by Edward Carpenter, Manchester: Labour Press, 1897; it afterwards appeared in French in L'Humanité Nouvelle (Ghent and Paris), August, 1900, edited by Auguste Hamon, the well-known Socialist and the French translator of Shaw's plays.

[77] The Class War, in the Clarion, September 30th, 1904.

[78] Shaw's position in regard to the Class War is ably set forth in his three articles, under the general heading, The Class War, which appeared in the Clarion, London; dates: September 30th, October 21st and November 4th, 1904.

[79] In 1888 Shaw wrote two very clever articles, which so far seem to have escaped attention, although the disguise is so thin as to be negligible. These two articles are, respectively, My Friend Fitzthunder, the Unpractical Socialist, by Redbarn Wash—note the anagram—(To-Day, edited by Hubert Bland, August, 1888), and Fitzthunder on Himself—A Defence, by Robespierre Marat Fitzthunder (To-Day, September, 1888). These very amusing papers, both written by Shaw, it is needless to say, constitute a reductio ad absurdum of the unpractical and revolutionary Socialist; Fitzthunder is evidently a composite picture, made up from a number of Shaw's Socialist confrères.

[80] Fabian Tract, No. 45: The Impossibilities of Anarchism, a paper by Shaw, written in 1888, read to the Fabian Society on October 16th, 1891, and published by the Fabian Society, July, 1893.

[81] Compare the former chapter; complete details are to be found in Fabian Tract No. 41, pages 12-15.

[82] In the twenty-seventh Annual Report on the work of the Fabian Society (for the year ended March 31st, 1910), the membership is given as 2,627.

[83] Worthy of record in connection with the new policy of the Fabian Society, although discussion is outside the scope of this work, is the movement inaugurated by Mr. Holbrook Jackson and Mr. A. R. Orage, afterwards joint-editors of the London Socialist organ, The New Age, in the foundation of the Leeds Art Club in 1905. “The object of the Leeds Art Club,” their syllabus read, “is to affirm the mutual dependence of art and ideas.” This movement, supported by a group of able lecturers, proved so successful and so stimulating as to eventuate in the formation of the Fabian Art Group (Bernard Shaw presiding over the initial meeting), the declared object of which is “to interpret the relation of Art and Philosophy to Socialism.” Admirable pamphlets and brochures have been published under its auspices; and its meetings, and the Fabian Summer School in Wales, have been addressed by many of the most brilliant and advanced thinkers in England.

[84] Fabian Tract No. 41, pages 15-16; date, 1892.

[85] The Fabian motto, suggested by Mr. Frank Podmore, runs: “For the right moment you must wait, as Fabius did most patiently when warring against Hannibal, though many censured his delays; but when the time comes you must strike hard, as Fabius did, or your waiting will be in vain and fruitless.”

[86] This book has now gone into its seventieth thousand, and has been republished in both Germany and America. It is regarded to-day as the standard text in English for Socialist lecturers and propagandists.

[87] Compare Fabian Tract No. 70: Report on Fabian Policy, the bombshell thrown by the Fabian Society into the International Socialist Workers' and Trade Union Congress, 1896.

[88] Socialism and Republicanism, in the Saturday Review, November 17th, 1900.

[89] For highly appreciative summaries of The Common Sense of Municipal Trading (Archibald Constable and Co.), and of Shaw's article, Socialism for Millionaires (first published in the Contemporary Review of February, 1896, and afterwards, in 1901, as Fabian Tract No. 107), compare Mr. Holbrook Jackson's monograph, Bernard Shaw, pages 114-131.

[90] Fabian Economics, in the Fortnightly Review, February, 1894. Mr. Mallock purposed to show how the defenders of a broad and social Conservatism, as outlined by himself, “may be able, by a fuller understanding of it, to speak to the intellect, the heart, and the hopes of the people of this country (England), like the voice of a trumpet, in comparison with which the voice of Socialism will be merely a penny whistle.” Shaw delightfully termed his rejoinder, On Mr. Mallock's Proposed Trumpet Performance, which brought forth, in the same magazine, not one, but two rejoinders from Mr. Mallock. In 1909 an attack by Mr. Mallock on Mr. Keir Hardie in the Times provoked Shaw to a fierce onslaught on his old opponent, and the Fabian Society presently republished the correspondence and the old Fortnightly article under the title, Socialism and Superior Brains. The latter, in a shilling edition, is also published by A. C. Fifield, London, in the Fabian Socialist Series.

[91] In his analysis of the situation in his native land, he insisted that Home Rule was a necessity for Ireland, because the Irish would never be content, would never feel themselves free, until Home Rule was granted them. It was not a question of logic, but a question of natural right.

[92] Socialism at the International Congress, in Cosmopolis, September, 1896.