system do tend steadily to the development of this crude socialistic
spirit in the mass of the proletariat; merely vindictive attacks upon
property, sabotage, and the general strike are the logical and
inevitable consequences of an uncontrolled concentration of property in
a few hands, and such things must and will go on, the deep undertow in
the deliquescence of the Normal Social Life, until a new justice, a new
scheme of compensations and satisfactions is attained, or the Normal
Social Life re-emerges.

Fabian socialism was the first systematic attempt to meet the fatal
absence of administrative schemes in the earlier socialisms. It can
scarcely be regarded now as anything but an interesting failure, but a
failure that has all the educational value of a first reconnaissance
into unexplored territory. Starting from that attack on aggregating
property, which is the common starting-point of all socialist projects,
the Fabians, appalled at the obvious difficulties of honest
confiscation and an open transfer from private to public hands,
conceived the extraordinary idea of _filching_ property for the state. A
small body of people of extreme astuteness were to bring about the
municipalisation and nationalisation first of this great system of
property and then of that, in a manner so artful that the millionaires
were to wake up one morning at last, and behold, they would find
themselves poor men! For a decade or more Mr. Pease, Mr. Bernard Shaw,
Mr. and Mrs. Sidney Webb, Mrs. Besant, Dr. Lawson Dodd, and their
associates of the London Fabian Society, did pit their wits and ability,
or at any rate the wits and ability of their leisure moments, against
the embattled capitalists of England and the world, in this complicated
and delicate enterprise, without any apparent diminution of the larger
accumulations of wealth. But in addition they developed another side of
Fabianism, still more subtle, which professed to be a kind of