aspire to be the next generation of leaders, where too are stationed all the higher ranks of Civil Service, is different in kind, as well as in size, from other cities.  New thought on social subjects is almost always the product of association.  Only those who live in a crowd of other thinkers know where there is room for new ideas; for it takes years for the top layer of political thought to find expression in books.  Therefore the provincial thinker on social problems is always a little out of date.  Except for one or two University men (e.g.  Sidney Ball and Sir Oliver Lodge) practically all Fabian tract-writers have been Londoners.  The local Fabian Societies have so far achieved nothing towards the making of a middle-class Socialist party, and they have achieved but little else.  They have been fully justified because every association for mutual instruction adds something to the mass of political intelligence, does something to disseminate ideas, but that is all that can be said for them.

The University Societies belong to a different type.  Nothing is more important than the education of young men and women in politics, and the older Universities have always recognised this.  Socialist Societies accordingly grew up naturally alongside Liberal and Tory Clubs, and under the shadow of the “Unions.”  Oxford, as we have seen, had a University Fabian Society from early days.  Cambridge followed at a much later date.  For years Glasgow University and University College, Aberystwyth, maintained flourishing societies.  The newer Universities, dependent largely on the bounty of wealthy capitalist founders and supporters, and assisted by, or in close touch with, town councils and local industries, have been much less willing to sanction political free-thought amongst their undergraduates, and the pernicious influence of wealth, or rather the fear of alarming the wealthy, has at times induced the authorities to interfere with the freedom of the undergraduates to combine for the study and propaganda of Socialism.

Undergraduate societies are composed of a constantly shifting population, and we arranged from the first that all their members should also be elected direct to the parent Society in order that they might remain automatically in membership when they “go down.”  In fact of course the percentage which retains its membership is very small.  “Men” and women at Universities join any organisation whose leaders at the moment are influential and popular.  They are sampling life to discover what suits them, and a few years later some of them are scattered over the globe, others immersed in science or art, or wholly occupied in law and medicine, in the church and the army, in the civil service and in journalism.  Most of them no doubt have ceased to pretend to take interest in social and political reform.  A few remain, and these are amongst the most valuable of our members.  At times, when an undergraduate of force of character and high social position, the