A SKETCH OF SOCIALISTIC THOUGHT IN ENGLAND 657
advantages and disadvantages of a "school." Their compact organization, controlled by a handful of strong leaders, has developed socialist theory as few individuals have been able to do, while at the same time the division of labor among the members and the limits of their specialties have deprived the society of some of the most important influences. The progress of thought within the society has been quite remarkable, and is well treated in G. Bernard Shaw's lecture on "The Fabian Society," delivered in 1892 (tract number 44). So marked, indeed, has been their progress that they are hardly more in harmony with the average Marxist group than with the Liberty and Property Defense League. The latest developments in Fabian thought are expressed in the manifesto presented to the International Socialist Congress in London, 1896. This is in large part reprinted in Bernard Shaw's article (Cosmopolis, Sep- tember 1896), next to Morris' Art and Socialism, the most bril- liant defense of socialism in English. As laid down in the manifesto
The object of the Fabian Society is to persuade the English people to make their political constitution thoroughly democratic, and so to socialize their industries as to make the livelihood of the people entirely independent of private capitalism .... The Fabian Society does not suggest that the state should monopolize industry as against private enterprise or individual initiative .... The distinction made between state socialism and social democracy in Germany .... has no meaning in England. It [the Fabian society] has no distinctive opinions on the marriage question, religion, art, abstract economics, historic evolution, currency .... It recognizes that social democracy is not the whole of the working-class programme .... Each installment of social democracy will only be a measure among other measures .... The Fabian Society, far from holding aloof from other bodies, urges its members to lose no opportunity of joining them, and perme- ating them with Fabian ideas as far as possible .... Compromise is a necessary condition of political progress .... The Fabian Society has no romantic illusions as to the freedom of the proletariat from narrow (middle class) ideals . The Fabian Society discards such phrases
as "the abolition of the wage system," which can only mislead the public as to the aims of socialism .... resolutely opposes all pretensions to hamper the socialization of industry with equal wages, equal hours of labor, equal official status, or equal authority for everyone .... The Fabian
