Accepting the great principle that the reconstruction of society to be worked for is the ownership and control of industry by the community, the Fabians refused to regard as articles of faith either the economic and historic analyses which Marx made use of or the political evolution which he predicted.

Socialism in England remained the fantastic creed of a group of fanatics until “Fabian Essays” and the Lancashire Campaign taught the working classes of England, or at any rate their leaders, that Socialism was a living principle which could be applied to existing social and political conditions without a cataclysm either insurrectionary or even political.  Revolutionary phraseology, the language of violence, survived, and still survives, just as in ordinary politics we use the metaphors of warfare and pretend that the peaceful polling booth is a battlefield and that our political opponents are hostile armies.  But we only wave the red flag in our songs, and we recognise nowadays that the real battles of Socialism are fought in committee rooms at Westminster and in the council chambers of Town Halls.

It was perhaps fortunate that none of the Fabian leaders came within the influence of the extraordinary personality of Karl Marx.  Had he lived a few years longer he might have dominated them as he dominated his German followers, and one or two of his English adherents.  Then years would have been wasted in the struggle to escape.  It was fortunate also that the Fabian Society has never possessed one single outstanding leader, and has always refrained from electing a president or permanent chairman.  There never has been a Fabian orthodoxy, because no one was in a position to assert what the true faith was.

Freedom of thought was without doubt obtained for English Socialists by the Fabians.  How far the world-wide revolt against Marxian orthodoxy had its origin in England is another and more difficult question.  In his study of the Fabian Society[43] M. Edouard Pfeiffer states in the preface that the Society makes this claim, quotes Bernard Shaw as saying to him, “The world has been thoroughly Fabianised in the last twenty-five years,” and adds that he is going to examine the accuracy of it.  Later he says:—­

“Les premiers de tous les Socialistes, les Fabiens out inaugure le mouvement de critique antimarxiste:  a une epoque ou les dogmes du maitre etaient consideres comme intangibles, les Fabiens out pretendu que l’on pouvait se dire socialiste sans jamais avoir lu le Capital ou en en desapprouvant la teneur; par opposition a Marx ils out ressuscite l’esprit de Stuart Mill et sur tous les points ils se sont attaques a Marx, guerre des classes et materialisme historique, catastrophisme et avant tout la question de la valeur-travail."[44]