The History of the Fabian SocietyPease, Edward R. (Edward Reynolds)
History
The History of the Fabian Society
Pease, Edward R. (Edward Reynolds)
Fabian Society (Great Britain); Socialism -- Great Britain
In the monthly reviews we find the same odd mixture of articles apposite
to present problems, and articles utterly out of date. The organisation
of agriculture is a perennial, and Lady Verney's "Peasant Proprietorship
in France" ("Contemporary," January, 1882), Mr. John Rae's "Co-operative
Agriculture in Germany" ("Contemporary," March, 1882), and Professor
Sedley Taylor's "Profit-Sharing in Agriculture" ("Nineteenth Century,"
October, 1882) show that change in the methods of exploiting the soil is
leaden-footed and lagging.
Problems of another class, centring round "the Family," present much the
same aspect now as they did thirty years ago. In his "Infant Mortality
and Married Women in Factories," Professor Stanley Jevons
("Contemporary," January, 1882) proposes that mothers of children under
three years of age should be excluded from factories, and we are at
present perhaps even farther from general agreement whether any measure
on these lines ought to be adopted.
But when we read the articles on Socialism--more numerous than might be
expected at that early date--we are in another world. Mr. Samuel Smith,
M.P., writing on "Social Reform" in the "Nineteenth Century" for May,
1883, says that: "Our country is still comparatively free from
Communism and Nihilism and similar destructive movements, but who can
tell how long this will continue? We have a festering mass of human
wretchedness in all our great towns, which is the natural hotbed of such
anarchical movements: all the great continental countries are full of
this explosive material. Can we depend on our country keeping free from
the infection when we have far more poverty in our midst than the
neighbouring European States?" Emigration and temperance reform, he
thinks, may avert the danger.
The Rev. Samuel (later Canon) Barnett in the same review a month earlier
advocated Free Libraries and graduated taxation to pay for free
education, under the title of "Practicable Socialism." In April, 1883,
Emile de Lavelaye described with alarm the "Progress of Socialism." "On
the Continent," he wrote, "Socialism is said to be everywhere." To it he
attributed with remarkable inaccuracy, the agrarian movement in Ireland,
and with it he connected the fact that Henry George's new book,
"Progress and Poverty," was selling by thousands "in an ultra popular
form" in the back streets and alleys of England. And then he goes on to
allude to Prince Bismarck's "abominable proposition to create a fund for
pensioning invalid workmen by a monopoly of tobacco"!
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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