One London group incident should be immortalized.  It was in the W.C. group, which met in Gt.  Ormond St. It consisted of two or three members who used to discuss bi-metallism.  I was a member geographically, but never attended.  One day I saw on the notice of meetings which I received an announcement that Samuel Butler would address the group on the authorship of the Odyssey.  Knowing that the group would have no notion of how great a man they were entertaining, I dashed down to the meeting; took the chair; gave the audience (about five strong including Butler and myself) to understand that the occasion was a great one; and when we had listened gravely to Samuel’s demonstration that the Odyssey was written by Nausicaa, carried a general expression of enthusiastic agreement with Butler, who thanked us with old-fashioned gravity and withdrew without giving a sign of his feelings at finding so small a meeting of the famous Fabian Society.  Considering how extraordinary a man Butler is now seen to have been, there is something tragic in the fact that the greatest genius among the long list of respectable dullards who have addressed us, never got beyond this absurd little group.

[27] Tract 41.  “The Fabian Society,” p. 18.

[28] Bernard Shaw has sent me the following note on this point:—­

The exact facts of the launching of the Newcastle Program are these.  Webb gave me the Program in his own handwriting as a string of resolutions.  I, being then a permeative Fabian on the executive of the South St. Pancras Liberal and Radical Association (I had coolly walked in and demanded to be elected to the Association and Executive, which was done on the spot by the astonished Association—­ten strong or thereabouts) took them down to a meeting in Percy Hall, Percy Street, Tottenham Court Road, where the late Mr. Beale, then Liberal candidate and subscription milch cow of the constituency (without the ghost of a chance), was to address as many of the ten as might turn up under the impression that he was addressing a public meeting.  There were certainly not 20 present, perhaps not 10.  I asked him to move the resolutions.  He said they looked complicated, and that if I would move them he would second them.  I moved them, turning over Webb’s pages by batches and not reading most of them.  Mr. Beale seconded.  Passed unanimously.  That night they went down to The Star with a report of an admirable speech which Mr. Beale was supposed to have delivered.  Next day he found the National Liberal Club in an uproar at his revolutionary break-away.  But he played up; buttoned his coat determinedly; said we lived in progressive times and must move with them; and carried it off.  Then he took the report of his speech to the United States and delivered several addresses founded on it with great success.  He died shortly after his last inevitable defeat.  He was an amiable and worthy man; and the devotion with which he fought so many forlorn hopes for his party should have earned him a safe seat.  But that debt was never paid or even acknowledged; and he felt the ingratitude very keenly.