A new Tract was adopted in January, 1887.  No. 5, “Facts for Socialists,” perhaps the most effective Socialist tract ever published in England.  It has sold steadily ever since it was issued:  every few years it has been revised and the figures brought up to date; the edition now on sale, published in 1915, is the eleventh.  The idea was not new.  Statistics of the distribution of our national income had been given, as previously mentioned, in one of the earliest manifestoes of the Democratic Federation.  But in Tract 5 the exact facts were rubbed in with copious quotations from recognised authorities and illustrated by simple diagrams.  The full title of the tract was “Facts for Socialists from the Political Economists and Statisticians,” and the theme of it was to prove that every charge made by Socialism against the capitalist system could be justified by the writings of the foremost professors of economic science.  It embodied another Fabian characteristic of considerable importance.  Other Socialists then, and many Socialists now, endeavoured by all means to accentuate their differences from other people.  Not content with forming societies to advocate their policy, they insisted that it was based on a science peculiar to themselves, the Marxian analysis of value, and the economic interpretation of history:  they strove too to dissociate themselves from others by the adoption of peculiar modes of address—­such as the use of the words “comrade” and “fraternal”—­and they were so convinced that no good thing could come out of the Galilee of capitalism that any countenance of capitalist parties or of the capitalist press was deemed an act of treachery.

The Fabians, on the other hand, tended to the view that “we are all Socialists now.”  They held that the pronouncements of economic science must be either right or wrong, and in any case science was not a matter of party; they endeavoured to show that on their opponents’ own principles they were logically compelled to be Socialists and must necessarily adopt Fabian solutions of social problems.

“Facts for Socialists” was the work of Sidney Webb.  No other member possessed anything like his knowledge of economics and statistics.  It is, as its title implies, simply a mass of quotations from standard works on Political Economy, strung together in order to prove that the bulk of the wealth annually produced goes to a small fraction of the community in return either for small services or for none at all, and that the poverty of the masses results, not as the individualists argue, from deficiencies of individual character, but, as John Stuart Mill had declared, from the excessive share of the national dividend that falls to the owners of land and capital.

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