It goes without saying that in our present position, and with the experience we have gained, we should produce a very different book if the work were to be done anew. We should not waste our time in killing dead horses, however vigorously they were kicking in 1889. We should certainly be much more careful not to give countenance to the notion that the unemployed can be set to work to inaugurate Socialism; though it remains true that the problem of the unemployed, from the moment when we cease to abandon them callously to their misery or soothe our consciences foolishly by buying them off with alms, will force us to organize them, provide for them, and train them; but the very first condition of success in this will be the abandonment of the old idea that the unemployed tailor can be set to make clothes for the unemployed bootmaker and the unemployed bootmaker to make boots for the unemployed tailor, the real difficulty being, not a scarcity of clothes and boots, but a stupid misdistribution of the money to buy them. We should also probably lay more stress on human volition and less on economic pressure and historic evolution as making for Socialism. We should, in short, give the dry practice of our solutions of social problems instead of the inspiration and theory of them. But we should also produce a volume which, though it might appeal more than the present one to administrative experts, to bankers, lawyers, and constructive statesmen, would have much less charm for the young, and for the ordinary citizen who is in these matters an amateur. Besides, the difference between the view of the young and the elderly is not necessarily a difference between wrong and right. The Tennysonian process of making stepping stones of our dead selves to higher things is pious in intention, but it sometimes leads downstairs instead of up. When Herbert Spencer in his later days expunged from his Social Statics the irresistible arguments for Land Nationalization by which he anticipated Henry George, we could not admit that the old Spencer had any right to do this violence to the young Spencer, or was less bound either to confute his position or admit it than if the two had been strangers to one another. Having had this lesson, we do not feel free to alter even those passages which no longer represent our latest conclusions. Fortunately, in the main we have nothing to withdraw, nothing to regret, nothing to apologize for, and much to be proud of. So we leave our book as it first came into the world, merely writing “Errors Excepted” as solicitors do: that is, with the firm conviction that the errors, if they exist at all, do not greatly matter. _21st May, 1908._ THE FABIAN SOCIETY. BY WILLIAM CLARKE, M.A.