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At the end of the year the sole fruit of the Parliamentary League was published.  It is Tract No. 6, entitled “The True Radical Programme” and consists of a declamatory criticism of the official Liberal-Radical Programme announced at Nottingham in October, 1887, and a demand to replace it by the True Radical Programme, namely, adult (in place of manhood) suffrage, payment of Members of Parliament and election expenses, taxation of unearned incomes, nationalisation of railways, the eight hours day, and a few other items.  “The above programme,” it says, “is sufficient for the present to fill the hands of the True Radical Party—­the New Labour Party—­in a word, the Practical Socialist Party,” It is by no means so able and careful a production as the Report on the Government Organisation of Unemployed Labour.

In April, 1888, the seven Essayists were elected as the Executive Committee, Graham Wallas and William Clarke taking the places of Frank Podmore and W.L.  Phillips, who retired, and at the same meeting the Parliamentary League was turned into the Political Committee of the Society; and Tract 7, “Capital and Land,” was approved.  This tract, the work of Sydney Olivier, is a reasoned attack on Single Tax as a panacea, and in addition contains an estimate of the total realised wealth of the country, just as “Facts for Socialists” does of its income.  This, too, has been regularly revised and reprinted ever since and commands a steady sale.  It is now in its seventh edition.

Meanwhile the series of meetings, variously described as Public, Ordinary, and Private, was kept on regularly twice a month, with a break only of two months from the middle of July.  Most of the meetings were still held in the houses of members, but as early as November, 1886, an ordinary meeting was held at Willis’s Rooms, King Street, St. James’s, at that time an ultra-respectable rendezvous for societies of the most select character, keeping up an old-fashioned ceremonial of crimson tablecloths, elaborate silver candlesticks, and impressively liveried footmen.  Having been turned out of Anderton’s Hotel, the Society, on the application of Olivier, was accepted solemnly at Willis’s, probably because the managers regarded the mere fact of our venturing to approach them as a certificate of high rank in the world of learned societies.

One meeting of this period is perhaps worthy of record.  On 16th March, 1888, Mr. R.B.  Haldane, M.P., subsequently Secretary of State for War and Lord Chancellor, addressed the Society on “Radical Remedies for Economic Evils.”  In the pages of the “Radical,” Vol.  II, No. 8, for March, 1888, can be found a vivid contemporary account of the proceedings from the pen of Mr. George Standring, entitled “Butchered to Make a Fabian Holiday.”  After describing the criticism of the lecture by Sidney Webb, Mrs. Besant, and Bernard Shaw the report proceeds:—­