Marxian Socialism regarded itself as a thing apart.  Marx had discovered a panacea for the ills of society:  the old was to be cleared away and all things were to become new.  In Marx’s own thought evolution and revolution were tangled and alternated.  The evolutionary side was essential to it; the idea of revolutionary catastrophe is almost an excrescence.  But to the Marxians (of whom Marx once observed that he was not one) this excrescence became the whole thing.  People were divided into those who advocated the revolution and those who did not.  The business of propaganda was to increase the number of adherents of the new at the expense of the supporters of the old.

The Fabians regarded Socialism as a principle already in part embodied in the constitution of society, gradually extending its influence because it harmonised with the needs and desires of men in countries where the large industry prevails.

Fabian Socialism is in fact an interpretation of the spirit of the times.  I have pointed out already that the municipalisation of monopolies, a typically Fabian process, had its origin decades before the Society was founded, and all that the Fabian Society did was to explain its social implications and advocate its wider extension.  The same is true of the whole Fabian political policy.  Socialism in English politics grew up because of the necessity for State intervention in the complex industrial and social organisation of a Great State.  Almost before the evil results of Laissez Faire had culminated Robert Owen was pointing the way to factory legislation, popular education, and the communal care of children.  The Ten Hours Act of 1847 was described by Marx himself as “the victory of a principle,” that is, of “the political economy of the working class."[46] That victory was frequently repeated in the next thirty years, and collective protection of Labour in the form of Factory Acts, Sanitary Acts, Truck Acts, Employers’ Liability Acts, and Trade Board Acts became a recognised part of the policy of both political parties.

Fabian teaching has had more direct influence in promoting the administrative protection of Labour.  The Fair Wages policy, now everywhere prevalent in State and Municipal employment, was, as has been already described, if not actually invented, at any rate largely popularised by the Society.  It was a working-class demand, and it has been everywhere put forward by organised labour, but its success would have been slower had the manual workers been left to fight their own battle.

I have said that the work of the Society was the interpretation of an existing movement, the explanation and justification of tendencies which originated in Society at large, and not in societies, Fabian or other.  That work is only less valuable than the formulation of new ideas.  None of the Fabians would claim to rank beside the great promulgators of new ideas, such as Owen and Marx.  But the interpretation of tendencies is