Note 574 — Chapter VII

In this development some share is to be attributed to the work of the Fabian Society, which, established in 1883, began in 1887 to exercise a growing influence on working-class opinion. The publication, in 1889, of Fabian Essays in Socialism, the circulation between 1887 and 1893 of three-quarters of a million copies of its series of “Fabian tracts,” and the delivery of several thousand lectures a year in London and other industrial centres, contributed largely to substitute a practical and constitutional policy of Collectivist reform for the earlier revolutionary propaganda. Tom Mann, Ben Tillett, and other Trade Union leaders were, from 1889 onwards, among the members of the parent Fabian Society, whilst the ninety independent local Fabian Societies in the provincial centres usually included many of the delegates to the local Trades Councils. Some account of the Society and its work will be found in Zum socialen Frieden, by Dr. von Schulze Gaevernitz (Leipzig, 1891, 2 vols.); in Englische Socialreformer, by Dr. M. Grunwald (Leipzig, 1897); in La Société Fabienne, by Edouard Pfeiffer (Paris, 1911); in Geschichte des Socialismus in England, by M. Beer (Stuttgart, 1913), republished in different English form as History of British Socialism(vol. i., 1918; vol. ii., 1920); in Socialism, a Critical Analysis, by O. D. Skelton, 1911; and in Political Thought in England from Herbert Spencer to the Present Day, by Ernest Barker, 1915. A superficial survey of the development of opinion is given in Socialism in England, by Sidney Webb (1st edition, 1889; 2nd edition, 1893). See History of the Fabian Society, by Edward R. Pease (1915).