Besides the School, and the Library connected with it, the Trust promoted for many years regular courses of Fabian educational lectures on social and political subjects, such as Socialism, Trade Unionism, Co-operation, Poor Law, Economics, and Economic History.  Lecturers were selected with care, and were in some cases given a maintenance allowance during the preparation of their lectures.  Then arrangements were made for courses of four lectures each, on what may be called University Extension lines, in four or five centres in one part of the country.  For example, in the year 1896-7 180 lectures were given in fifty towns, half of them under the auspices of branches of the I.L.P., and the rest organised by Co-operative Societies, Liberal Associations, Trade Unions, and other bodies.  Very careful syllabuses were prepared and widely circulated, and the whole scheme was intended to be educational rather than directly propagandist.  The first lecturers engaged were J. Ramsay Macdonald and Miss Enid Stacy, whose premature death, a few years after her marriage to the Rev. Percy Widdrington, was a great loss to the movement.  This lecturing was maintained for many years.  In 1900, shortly after the creation there of County and District Councils, we experimented upon Ireland, where J. Bruce Glasier and S.D.  Shallard gave a number of courses of lectures, without any very obvious results.  In 1902 W. Stephen Sanders took over the work, but the fund was coming to an end, and after 1904 subsidised lecturing virtually ceased.

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In order to help working-class students who had the desire to study more continuously than by attendance at lectures, correspondence classes were started in the same class of subject as the lectures.  A textbook was selected and divided into sections, to each of which an introduction was written, concluding with questions.  Written answers were sent in and corrected by the conductor of the class.  This went on regularly until 1900, when Ruskin College, Oxford, organised similar classes on a larger scale, and our services were no longer required.

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In August, 1896, the triennial International Socialist Workers and Trade Union Congress was held in London, at which the Society was represented by a numerous delegation.  The chief business proved to be the expulsion of the Anarchists, who at this period attended these conferences and had to be got rid of before the appointed business could be carried on.  The Society prepared an important “Report” for circulation at the Congress, one part of it advocating various reforms, no longer of any special interest, and the other part consisting of a summary of the principles and policy of the Society, drafted by Bernard Shaw in a series of epigrammatic paragraphs.  This document, still circulated as Tract 70, is interesting both as a brief and vivid exposition of Fabianism and because it gave rise to another of the long series of fights on the policy of political toleration.  The passage chiefly objected to, written, of course, for foreigners, and therefore more detailed than otherwise would be necessary, is as follows:—­