proprietary classes to “support all undertakings having for their object the parcelling out of waste or inferior lands amongst the labouring class” for sundry plausible reasons.  At the foot of the title page, in the smallest of type, is the following:  “Note.—­Great care should be taken to keep this tract out of the hands of radical workmen, Socialist demagogues and the like, as they are but too apt to conclude that schemes favourable to landlords cannot be permanently advantageous to the working class.”  This elaborate joke was, except for one amendment, adopted as drafted on June 5th, 1885, and there is a tradition that it was favourably reviewed by a Conservative newspaper!

The Society still met as a rule at 17 Osnaburgh Street, or in the rooms of Frank Podmore at 14 Dean’s Yard, Westminster, but it was steadily growing and new members were elected at every meeting.  Although most of the members were young men of university education, the Society included people of various ages.  To us at any rate Mrs. James Hinton, widow of Dr. Hinton, and her sisters, Miss Haddon and Miss Caroline Haddon, seemed to be at least elderly.  Mrs. Robins, her husband (a successful architect), and her daughter, who acted as “assistant” honorary secretary for the first eighteen months, lent an air of prosperous respectability to our earliest meetings.  Mr. and Mrs. J. Glode Stapleton, who were prominent members for some years, were remarkable amongst us because they drove to our meetings in their own brougham!  The working classes, as before mentioned, had but a single representative.  Another prominent member at this period was Mrs. Charlotte M. Wilson, wife of a stock-broker living in Hampstead, who a short time later “simplified” into a cottage at the end of the Heath, called Wildwood Farm, now a part of the Garden Suburb Estate, where Fabians for many years held the most delightful of their social gatherings.  Mrs. Wilson was elected to the Executive of five in December, 1884 (Mrs. Wilson, H. Bland, E.R.  Pease, G. Bernard Shaw and F. Keddell), but after some time devoted herself entirely to the Anarchist movement, led by Prince Kropotkin, and for some years edited their paper, “Freedom.”  But she remained throughout a member of the Fabian Society, and twenty years later she resumed her Fabian activity, as will be related in a later chapter.

All this time the Socialist movement in England was coming into public notice with startling rapidity.  In January, 1884, “Justice, the organ of the Democratic Federation,” was founded, and in August of that year the Federation made the first of its many changes of name, and became the Social Democratic Federation or S.D.F.  The public then believed, as the Socialists also necessarily believed, that Socialism would be so attractive to working-class electors that they would follow its banner as soon as it was raised, and the candidatures undertaken by the S.D.F. at the General Election in November, 1885, produced widespread alarm amongst politicians of both parties.  The following account of this episode from Fabian Tract 41, “The Early History of the Fabian Society,” was written by Bernard Shaw in 1892, and describes the events and our attitude at the time far more freshly and graphically than anything I can write nearly thirty years later.