Part 6 (1/2)

Finally it may be mentioned that a Universities Committee, with Frank Podmore as Secretary for Oxford and G.W. Johnson for Cambridge, had begun the ”permeation” of the Universities, which has always been an important part of the propaganda of the Society.

At the Annual Meeting in April, 1889, the Essayists were re-elected as the Executive Committee and Sydney Olivier as Honorary Secretary, but he only retained the post till the end of the year. I returned to London in October, was promptly invited to resume the work, and took it over in January, 1890.

In July another important tract was approved for publication. ”Facts for Londoners,” No. 8 in the series, 55 pages of packed statistics sold for 6d., was the largest publication the Society had yet attempted. It is, as its sub-t.i.tle states: ”an exhaustive collection of statistical and other facts relating to the Metropolis, with suggestions for reform on Socialist principles.” The latter were in no sense concealed: the Society still waved the red flag in season and out. ”The Socialist Programme of immediately practicable reforms for London cannot be wholly dissociated from the corresponding Programme for the kingdom.” This is the opening sentence, and it is followed by a page of explanation of the oppression of the workers by the private appropriation of rent and interest, and an outline of the proposed reforms, graduated and differentiated income tax, increased death duties, extension of the Factory Acts, reform of the Poor Law, payment of all public representatives, adult suffrage, and several others.

Then the tract settles down to business. London with its County Council only a few months old was at length waking to self-consciousness: Mr.

Charles Booth's ”Life and Labour in East London”--subsequently issued as the first part of his monumental work--had just been published; it was the subject of a Fabian lecture by Sidney Webb on May 17th; and interest in the political, economic, and social inst.i.tutions of the city was general. The statistical facts were at that time practically unknown.

They had to be dug out, one by one, from obscure and often unpublished sources, and the work thus done by the Fabian Society led up in later years to the admirable and far more voluminous statistical publications of the London County Council.

The tract deals with area and population; with rating, land values, and housing, with water, trams, and docks, all at that time in the hands of private companies, with gas, markets, City Companies, libraries, public-houses, cemeteries; and with the local government of London, Poor Law Guardians and the poor, the School Board and the schools, the Vestries, District Boards, the County Council, and the City Corporation.

It was the raw material of Munic.i.p.al Socialism, and from this time forth the Society recognised that the munic.i.p.alisation of monopolies was a genuine part of the Socialist programme, that the transfer from private exploiters to public management at the start, and ultimately by the amortisation of the loans to public owners.h.i.+p, actually was _pro tanto_ the transfer from private to public owners.h.i.+p of land and capital, as demanded by Socialists.

Here, in pa.s.sing, we may remark that there is a legend, current chiefly in the United States, that the wide extension of munic.i.p.al owners.h.i.+p in Great Britain is due to the advocacy of the Fabian Society. This is very far from the truth. The great provincial munic.i.p.alities took over the management of their water and gas because they found munic.i.p.al control alike convenient, beneficial to the citizens, and financially profitable: Birmingham in the seventies was the Mecca of Munic.i.p.alisation, and in 1882 the Electric Lighting Act pa.s.sed by Mr.

Joseph Chamberlain was so careful of the interests of the public, so strict in the limitations it put upon the possible profits to the investor, that electric lighting was blocked in England for some years, and the Act had to be modified in order that capital might be attracted.[22]

What the Fabian Society did was to point out that Socialism did not necessarily mean the control of all industry by a centralised State; that to introduce Socialism did not necessarily require a revolution because much of it could be brought about piecemeal by the votes of the local electors. And secondly the Society complained that London was singularly backward in munic.i.p.al management: that the wealthiest city in the world was handed over to the control of exploiters, who made profits from its gas, its water, its docks, and its tramways, whilst elsewhere these monopolies were owned and worked by public authorities who obtained all the advantages for the people of the localities concerned.

Moreover, it may be questioned whether the Fabian advocacy of munic.i.p.alisation hastened or r.e.t.a.r.ded that process in London. In provincial towns munic.i.p.alisation--the word of course was unknown--had been regarded as of no social or political significance. It was a business matter, a local affair, a question of convenience. In London, partly owing to Fabian advocacy and partly because London had at last a single representative authority with a recognised party system, it became the battle ground of the parties: the claim of the Socialists awakened the Individualists to opposition: and the tramways of London were held as a trench in the world-wide conflict between Socialism and its enemies, whose capture was hailed as an omen of progress by one side, and by the other deplored as the presage of defeat.

”Facts for Londoners” was the work of Sidney Webb, but there is nothing in the tract to indicate this. The publications of the Society were collective works, in that every member was expected to a.s.sist in them by criticism and suggestion. Although several of the tracts were lectures or papers written by members for other purposes, and are so described, it was not until the issue in November, 1892, of Tract 42, ”Christian Socialism,” by the Rev. S.D. Headlam, that the author's name is printed on the t.i.tle page. The reason for the innovation is obvious: this tract was written by a Churchman for Christians, and whilst the Society as a whole approved the conclusions, the premises commended themselves to but a few. It was therefore necessary that the responsibility of the author should be made clear.

The autumn of 1889 is memorable for the great strike of the London Dockers, which broke out on August 14th, was led by John Burns, and was settled mainly by Cardinal Manning on September 14th. The Fabian Society held no meeting between July 19th and September 20th, and there is nothing in the minutes or the Annual Report to show that the Society as such took any part in the historic conflict. But many of the members as individuals lent their aid to the Dockers in their great struggle, which once for all put an end to the belief that hopeless disorganisation is a necessary characteristic of unskilled labour.[23]

Arising out of the Dock Strike, the special demand of the Socialist section of trade unionists for the next four or five years was a legal eight hours day, and the Fabian Society now for the first time recognised that it could render substantial a.s.sistance to the labour movement by putting into a practicable shape any reform which was the current demand of the day.

At the members' meeting on September 20 a committee was appointed to prepare an Eight Hours Bill for introduction into Parliament, and in November this was published as Tract No. 9. It consists of a Bill for Parliament, drawn up in proper form, with explanatory notes. It provided that eight hours should be the maximum working day for Government servants, for railway men, and for miners, and that other trades should be brought in when a Secretary of State was satisfied that a majority of the workers desired it. The tract had a large sale--20,000 had been printed in six months--and it was specially useful because, in fact, it showed the inherent difficulty of any scheme for universal limitation of the hours of labour.

The Eight Hours Day agitation attained larger proportions than any other working-cla.s.s agitation in England since the middle of the nineteenth century. For a number of years it was the subject of great annual demonstrations in Hyde Park. It commended itself both to the practical trade unionists, who had always aimed at a reduction in the hours of labour, and to the theoretical socialists, who held that the exploiter's profits came from the final hours of the day's work. The Fabian plan of ”Trade Option” was regarded as too moderate, and demands were made for a ”Trade Exemption” Bill, that is, a Bill enacting a universal Eight Hours Day, with power to any trade to vote its own exclusion. But the more the subject was discussed, the more obvious the difficulties became, and at last it was recognised that each trade must be dealt with separately. Considerable reductions of hours were meantime effected in particular industries; an eight-hour day became the rule in the Government factories and dockyards; the Board of Trade was empowered to insist on the reduction of unduly long hours of duty on railways; finally in 1908 the Miners' Eight Hours Act became law; and the demand for any general Bill faded away.

The autumn meetings were occupied by a course of lectures at Willis's Rooms on ”A Century of Social Movements,” by Frank Podmore, William Clarke, Graham Wallas, Hubert Bland, and Mrs. Besant, and with the beginning of the year 1890 we come to the publication of ”Fabian Essays,” and a new chapter in the History of the Society.

FOOTNOTES:

[16] On this pa.s.sage Shaw has written the following criticism, which I have not adopted because on the whole I do not agree with it: ”I think this is wrong, because the Fabians were at first as bellicose as the others, and Marx had been under no delusion as to the Commune and did not bequeath a tradition of its repet.i.tion. Bakunin was as popular a prophet as Marx. Many of us--Bland and Keddell among others--were members of the S.D.F., and I was constantly speaking for the S.D.F. and the League. We did not keep ourselves to ourselves; we aided the working cla.s.s organisations in every possible way; and they were jolly glad to have us. In fact the main difference between us was that we worked for everybody (permeation) and they worked for their own societies only. The real reason that we segregated for purposes of thought and study was that the workers could not go our pace or stand our social habits.

Hyndman and Morris and Helen Taylor and the other bourgeois S.D.F.-ers and Leaguers were too old for us; they were between forty and fifty when we were between twenty and thirty.”

[17] On this pa.s.sage Shaw comments, beginning with an expletive, and proceeding: ”I was the only one who had any principles. But surely the secret of it is that we didn't really want to be demagogues, having other fish to fry, as our subsequent careers proved. Our decision not to stand for Parliament in 1892 was the turning point. I was offered some seats to contest--possibly Labour ones--but I always replied that they ought to put up a bona fide working man. We lacked ambition.”

[18] See ”The Great Society,” by Graham Wallas (Macmillan, 1914), p.

260.

[19] For a much fuller account of this subject, see Appendix I. A.

[20] See Appendix II.

[21] See Fabian Tract 147, ”Capital and Compensation,” by Edw. R. Pease.

[22] See ”Fabian Essays,” p. 51, for the first point, and Fabian Tract No. 119 for the second.