That unorganized, unpaid public service of public-spirited aristocratic and wealthy financial and business people, the "governing class," which dominated the British Empire throughout the nineteenth century, has, through the absence of definite class boundaries in England and the readiness of each class to take its tone from the class above, that "Snobbishness" which is so often heedlessly dismissed as altogether evil, given a unique quality to British thought upon public questions and to British conceptions of Socialism. It has made the British mind as a whole "administrative." As compared with the American mind, for example, the British is State-conscious, the American State-blind. The American is no doubt intensely patriotic, but the nation and the State to which his patriotism points is something overhead and comprehensive like the sky, like a flag hoisted; something, indeed, that not only does not but must not interfere with his ordinary business occupations. To have public spirit, to be aware of the State as a whole and to have an administrative feeling towards it, is necessarily to be accessible to constructive ideas--that is to say, to Socialistic ideas. In the history of thought in Victorian Great Britain, one sees a constant conflict of this administrative disposition with the individualistic commercialism of the aggressively trading and manufacturing class, the class that in America reigns unchallenged to this day. In the latter country Individualism reigns unchallenged, it is assumed; in the former it has fought an uphill fight against the traditions of Church and State and has never absolutely prevailed. The political economists and Herbert Spencer were its prophets, and they never at any time held the public mind in any invincible grip. Since the eighties that grip has weakened more and more. Socialistic thought and legislation, therefore, was going on in Great Britain through all the Victorian period. Nevertheless, it was the Fabian Society that, in the eighties and through the intellectual impetus of at most four or five personalities, really brought this obstinately administrative spirit in British affairs into relation with Socialism as such.
The dominant intelligence of this group was Mr. Sidney Webb, and as I think of him thus coming after Marx to develop the third phase of Socialism, I am struck by the contrast with the big-bearded Socialist leaders of the earlier school and this small, active, unpretending figure with the finely-shaped head, the little imperial under the lip, the glasses, the slightly lisping, insinuating voice. He emerged as a Colonial Office clerk of conspicuous energy and capacity, and he was already the leader and "idea factory" of the Fabian Society when he married Miss Beatrice Potter, the daughter of a Conservative Member of Parliament, a girl friend of Herbert Spencer, and already a brilliant student of sociological questions. Both he and she are devotees to social service, living laborious, ordered, austere, incessant lives, making the employment of secretaries their one extravagance, and alternations between research and affairs their change of occupation. A new type of personality altogether they were in the Socialist movement, which had hitherto been richer in eloquence than discipline. And during the past twenty years of the work of the Fabian Society through their influence, one dominant question has prevailed. Assuming the truth of the two main generalizations of Socialism, taking that statement of intention for granted, _how is the thing to be done_? They put aside the glib assurances of the revolutionary Socialists that everything would be all right when the People came to their own; and so earned for themselves the undying resentment of all those who believe the world is to be effectually mended by a liberal use of chest notes and red flags. They insisted that the administrative and economic methods of the future must be a secular development of existing institutions, and inaugurated a process of study--which has long passed beyond the range of the Fabian Society, broadening out with the organized work of the New University of London, with its special School of Economics and Political Science and of a growing volume of university study in England and America--to the end that this "_how?_" should be answered....