None of us at that time was sufficiently experienced in the business of authorship to appreciate the astonishing success of the venture. In a month the whole edition of 1000 copies was exhausted. With the exception of Mrs. Besant, whose fame was still equivocal, not one of the authors had published any book of importance, held any public office, or was known to the public beyond the circles of London political agitators. The Society they controlled numbered only about 150 members. The subject of their volume was far less understood by the public than is Syndicalism at the present day. And yet a six-shilling book, published at a private dwelling-house and not advertised in the press, or taken round by travellers to the trade, sold almost as rapidly as if the authors had been Cabinet Ministers. A second edition of 1000 copies was issued in March, 1890: in September Mr. Walter Scott undertook the agency of a new shilling paper edition, 5000 of which were sold before publication and some 20,000 more within a year. In 1908 a sixpenny paper edition with a new preface by the editor was issued by Walter Scott, of which 10,000 were disposed of in a few months, and in all some 46,000 copies of the book have been sold in English editions alone. It is difficult to trace the number of foreign editions and translations. The authors made over to the Society all their rights in the volume, and permission for translation and for publication in the United States has always been freely given. In that country we can trace an edition in 1894, published by Charles E. Brown of Boston, with an Introduction by Edward Bellamy and a Preface of some length on the Fabian Society and its work by William Clarke: and another edition in 1909, published by the Ball Publishing Company of Boston, also with the Introduction on the Fabian Society. A Dutch translation by F.M. Wibaut was published in 1891; in 1806 the Essays, translated into Norwegian by Francis Wolff, appeared as a series of small books; and in 1897 a German translation by Dora Lande was issued by G.H. Wigand of Leipzig. The effect of "Fabian Essays" arose as much from what it left out as from what it contained. Only the fast-dwindling band of pioneer Socialists, who lived through the movement in its earliest days, can fully realise the environment of ideas from which "Fabian Essays" showed a way of escape.