In connection with the first tracts another point may be mentioned.  The Society has stuck to the format adopted in these early days, and with a few special exceptions all its publications have been issued in the same style, and with numbers running on consecutively.  For all sorts of purposes the advantage of this continuity has been great.

* * * * *

On January 2nd, 1885, Bernard Shaw was elected to the Executive Committee, and about the same time references to the Industrial Remuneration Conference appear in the minutes.  This remarkable gathering, made possible by a gift of L1000 from Mr. Miller of Edinburgh, was summoned to spend three days in discussing the question, “Has the increase of products of industry within the last hundred years tended most to the benefit of capitalists and employers or to that of the working classes, whether artisans, labourers or others?  And in what relative proportions in any given period?”

The second day was devoted to “Remedies,” and the third to the question, “Would the more general distribution of capital or land or the State management of capital or land promote or impair the production of wealth and the welfare of the community?” The Fabian Society appointed two delegates, J.G.  Stapleton and Hubert Bland, but Bernard Shaw apparently took the place of the latter.

It met on January 28th, at the Prince’s Hall, Piccadilly.  Mr. Arthur J. Balfour read a paper in which he made an observation worth recording:  “As will be readily believed, I am no Socialist, but to compare the work of such men as Mr. (Henry) George with that of such men, for instance, as Karl Marx, either in respect of its intellectual force, its consistency, its command of reasoning in general, or of economic reasoning in particular, seems to me absurd.”

The Conference was the first occasion in which the Fabian Society emerged from its drawing-room obscurity, and the speech of Bernard Shaw on the third day was probably the first he delivered before an audience of more than local importance.  One passage made an impression on his friends and probably on the public.  “It was,” he said, “the desire of the President that nothing should be said that might give pain to particular classes.  He was about to refer to a modern class, the burglars, but if there was a burglar present he begged him to believe that he cast no reflection upon his profession, and that he was not unmindful of his great skill and enterprise:  his risks—­so much greater than those of the most speculative capitalist, extending as they did to risk of liberty and life—­his abstinence; or finally of the great number of people to whom he gave employment, including criminal attorneys, policemen, turnkeys, builders of gaols, and it might be the hangman.  He did not wish to hurt the feelings of shareholders ... or of landlords ... any more than he wished to pain burglars.  He would merely point out that all three inflicted on the community an injury of precisely the same nature."[11]