A second edition of 1000 copies was issued in March, 1890:  in September Mr. Walter Scott undertook the agency of a new shilling paper edition, 5000 of which were sold before publication and some 20,000 more within a year.  In 1908 a sixpenny paper edition with a new preface by the editor was issued by Walter Scott, of which 10,000 were disposed of in a few months, and in all some 46,000 copies of the book have been sold in English editions alone.  It is difficult to trace the number of foreign editions and translations.  The authors made over to the Society all their rights in the volume, and permission for translation and for publication in the United States has always been freely given.  In that country we can trace an edition in 1894, published by Charles E. Brown of Boston, with an Introduction by Edward Bellamy and a Preface of some length on the Fabian Society and its work by William Clarke:  and another edition in 1909, published by the Ball Publishing Company of Boston, also with the Introduction on the Fabian Society.  A Dutch translation by F.M.  Wibaut was published in 1891; in 1806 the Essays, translated into Norwegian by Francis Wolff, appeared as a series of small books; and in 1897 a German translation by Dora Lande was issued by G.H.  Wigand of Leipzig.

The effect of “Fabian Essays” arose as much from what it left out as from what it contained.  Only the fast-dwindling band of pioneer Socialists, who lived through the movement in its earliest days, can fully realise the environment of ideas from which “Fabian Essays” showed a way of escape.

The Socialism of the Social Democratic Federation and the Socialist League, the two societies which had hitherto represented Socialism to the general public, was altogether revolutionary.  Socialism was to be the result of an outbreak of violence, engineered by a great popular organisation like that of the Chartists or the Anti-Corn Law League, and the Commune of Paris in 1871 was regarded as a premature attempt which pointed the way to future success.  The Socialist Government thus established was to reconstruct the social and industrial life of the nation according to a plan supposed to be outlined by Karl Marx.  “On the morrow of the revolution” all things would be new, and at a bound the nation was expected to reach something very like the millennium.

The case for this project was based, strange to say, not on any history but on the Marxian analysis of the origin of the value of commodities, and no man who did not understand this analysis, or pretend to understand it, was fit to be called a “comrade.”  The economic reasoning which “proved” this “law” was expressed in obscure and technical language peculiar to the propagandists of the movement, and every page of Socialist writings was studded with the then strange words “proletariat” and “bourgeoisie.”

Lastly, the whole world, outside the socialist movement, was regarded as in a conspiracy of repression.  Liberals (all capitalists), Tories (all landlords), the Churches (all hypocrites), the rich (all idlers), and the organised workers (all sycophants) were treated as if they fully understood and admitted the claims of the Socialists, and were determined for their own selfish ends to reject them at all costs.