This four-page leaflet has now remained in print for over thirty years, and there is no reason to suppose that the demand for it will soon cease.  According to tradition, it was drafted by W.L.  Phillips, a house-painter, at that time the only “genuine working man” in our ranks.  He had been introduced to me by a Positivist friend, and was in his way a remarkable man, ready at any time to talk of his experiences of liberating slaves by the “Underground Railway” in the United States.  He worked with us cordially for several years and then gradually dropped out.  The original edition of “Why are the many poor?” differs very little from that now in circulation.  It was revised some years later by Bernard Shaw, who cut down the rhetoric and sharpened the phraseology, but the substance has not been changed.  It is remarkable as containing a sneer at Christianity, the only one to be found in the publications of the Society.  Perhaps this was a rebound from excess of “subordination of material things to spiritual things” insisted on by the Fellowship of the New Life!

The tract had on its title page two mottoes, the second of which has played some part in the Society’s history.  They were produced, again according to tradition, by Frank Podmore, and, though printed as quotations, are not to be discovered in any history:—­

“Wherefore it may not be gainsaid that the fruit of this man’s long taking of counsel—­and (by the many so deemed) untimeous delays—­was the safe-holding for all men, his fellow-citizens, of the Common Weal.”

“For the right moment you must wait, as Fabius did most patiently, when warring against Hannibal, though many censured his delays; but when the time comes you must strike hard, as Fabius did, or your waiting will be in vain, and fruitless.”

It has been pointed out by Mr. H.G.  Wells, and by others before him, that Fabius never did strike hard; and many have enquired when the right time for the Fabians to strike would come.  In fact, we recognised at that time that we did not know what were the remedies for the evils of society as we saw them and that the right time for striking would not come until we knew where to strike.  Taken together as the two mottoes were first printed, this meaning is obvious.  The delay was to be for the purpose of “taking counsel.”

Tract No. 1, excellent as it is, shows a sense of the evil, but gives no indication of the remedy.  Its contents are commonplace, and in no sense characteristic of the Society.  The men who were to make its reputation had not yet found it out, and at this stage our chief characteristic was a lack of self-confidence unusual amongst revolutionaries.  We had with considerable courage set out to reconstruct society, and we frankly confessed that we did not know how to go about it.

The next meeting to which we need refer took place on May 16th.  The minutes merely record that Mr. Rowland Estcourt read a paper on “The Figures of Mr. Mallock,” but a pencil note in the well-known handwriting of Bernard Shaw has been subsequently added:  “This meeting was made memorable by the first appearance of Bernard Shaw.”