And so, year after year, the misery grows, and every great city has on its womb a cancer; sapping its vitality, poisoning its life-blood.  Every great city is breeding in its slums a race which is reverting through the savage to the brute—­a brute more dangerous in that degraded humanity has possibilities of evil in it beyond the reach of the mere wild beast.  If not for Love’s sake, then for fear; if not for justice or for human pity, then for sheer desire of self-preservation; I appeal to the wise and to the wealthy to set their hands to the cure of social evil, ere stolidity gives place to passion and dull patience vanishes before fury, and they

“‘Learn at last, in some wild hour, how much the wretched dare.’”

Because it was less hotly antagonistic to the Radicals than the two other Socialist organisations, I joined the Fabian Society, and worked hard with it as a speaker and lecturer.  Sidney Webb, G. Bernard Shaw, Hubert and Mrs. Bland, Graham Wallas—­these were some of those who gave time, thought, incessant work to the popularising of Socialist thought, the spreading of sound economics, the effort to turn the workers’ energy toward social rather than merely political reform.  We lectured at workmen’s clubs wherever we could gain a hearing, till we leavened London Radicalism with Socialist thought, and by treating the Radical as the unevolved Socialist rather than as the anti-Socialist, we gradually won him over to Socialist views.  We circulated questions to be put to all candidates for parliamentary or other offices, stirred up interest in local elections, educated men and women into an understanding of the causes of their poverty, won recruits for the army of propagandists from the younger of the educated middle class.  That the London working classes to-day are so largely Socialist is greatly due to the years of work done among them by members of the Fabian Society, as well to the splendid, if occasionally too militant, energy of the Social Democratic Federation, and to the devotion of that noble and generous genius, William Morris.

During this same year (1885) a movement was set on foot in England to draw attention to the terrible sufferings of the Russian political prisoners, and it was decided at a meeting held in my house to form a society of the friends of Russia, which should seek to spread accurate and careful information about the present condition of Russia.  At that meeting were present Charles Bradlaugh, “Stepniak,” and many others, E.R.  Pease acting as honorary secretary.  It is noteworthy that some of the most prominent Russian exiles—­such as Kropotkin—­take the view that the Tzar himself is not allowed to know what occurs, and is very largely the victim of the bureaucracy that surrounds him.