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
accomplished by a political method, applicable by a majority of the
voters, and capable of being drafted as an Act of Parliament by any
competent lawyer.
To George belongs the extraordinary merit of recognising the right way
of social salvation. The Socialists of earlier days had proposed
segregated communities; the Co-operators had tried voluntary
associations; the Positivists advocated moral suasion; the Chartists
favoured force, physical or political; the Marxists talked revolution
and remembered the Paris Commune. George wrote in a land where the
people ruled themselves, not only in fact but also in name. The United
States in the seventies was not yet dominated by trusts and controlled
by millionaires. Indeed even now that domination and control, dangerous
and disastrous as it often is, could not withstand for a moment any
widespread uprising of the popular will. Anyway, George recognised that
in the Western States political institutions could be moulded to suit
the will of the electorate; he believed that the majority desired to
seek their own well-being and this could not fail to be also the
well-being of the community as a whole. From Henry George I think it may
be taken that the early Fabians learned to associate the new gospel with
the old political method.
But when we came to consider the plan proposed by George we quickly saw
that it would not carry us far. Land may be the source of all wealth to
the mind of a settler in a new country. To those whose working day was
passed in Threadneedle Street and Lombard Street, on the floor of the
Stock Exchange, and in the Bank of England, land appears to bear no
relation at all to wealth, and the allegation that the whole surplus of
production goes automatically to the landowners is obviously untrue.
George's political economy was old-fashioned or absurd; and his solution
of the problem of poverty could not withstand the simplest criticism.
Taxation to extinction of the rent of English land would only affect a
small fraction of England's wealth.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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