“FABIAN ELECTORAL TACTICS.

“The Fabian Society does not claim to be the people of England, or even the Socialist party, and therefore does not seek direct political representation by putting forward Fabian candidates at elections.  But it loses no opportunity of influencing elections, and inducing constituencies to select Socialists as their candidates.  No person, however, can obtain the support of the Fabian Society or escape its opposition, merely by calling himself a Socialist or Social-Democrat.  As there is no Second Ballot in England, frivolous candidatures give great offence and discredit the party in whose name they are undertaken, because any third candidate who is not well supported will not only be beaten himself but may also involve in his defeat the better of the two candidates competing with him.  Under such circumstances the Fabian Society throws its weight against the third candidate, whether he calls himself a Socialist or not, in order to secure the victory to the better of the two candidates between whom the contest really lies.  But when the third candidate is not only a serious representative of Socialism, but can organise his party well and is likely to poll sufficient votes to make even his defeat a respectable demonstration of the strength and growth of Socialism in the constituency, the Fabian Society supports him resolutely under all circumstances and against all other parties.”

This was an extreme statement of our position, because the Society has never, so far as I am aware, taken any action which could be described as “throwing its weight against” a third candidate in a parliamentary election.  But it represented our policy as it might have been, if occasion had arisen to carry it to its logical conclusion.

It was opposed, not because it was an inaccurate statement of fact, but because a minority of the Society desired to change the policy it described; and after the Congress was over an influential requisition was got up by J. Ramsay Macdonald, who had been elected to the Executive Committee in 1894, demanding that the tract be withdrawn from circulation.  The battle was joined at Clifford’s Inn in October, and the insurgents were defeated, after an exciting discussion, by 108 to 33.

* * * * *

There is little to record of the years that followed.  Graham Wallas, who had been elected to the London School Board in 1894, resigned his seat on the Executive in 1895; Bernard Shaw became a St. Pancras Vestryman without a contest in 1897, an event rather of literary[30] than political significance, and in 1898 he had a serious illness which kept him out of the movement for nearly two years; whilst at the end of 1899 Sydney Olivier was appointed Colonial Secretary of Jamaica, and spent most of the next fourteen years in the West Indies, latterly as Governor of Jamaica, until 1913, when he was recalled to London to be the Secretary of the Board of Agriculture.