Proud Tower - Barbara W. Tuchman [229]
Peace, Retrenchment and Reform which had satisfied as the Liberal creed for so long were no longer adequate. The optimistic Liberalism of the Nineteenth Century was past. An “indignant pessimism” inspired Charles Masterman’s From the Abyss in 1902 and In Peril of Change in 1905. A young Liberal journalist, literary editor of the Daily News, devoutly High Church in religion, married to a Lyttelton whose uncle was a member of Balfour’s cabinet, he was one of the new kind of Liberal, puzzled and disturbed by trends which betrayed the promise of the Nineteenth Century. Another was the lonely economist J. A. Hobson, author of The Social Problem, 1901. He saw the brilliant hopes of early Liberalism overcast by the doctrine of survival of the fittest and the energy for progress absorbed in material growth. Political Economy having failed to solve the Social Problem, he believed a new social science was needed to “furnish a satisfactory basis for the art of social progress.” Hobson fixed on unemployment as the crux of the matter. He saw it as a waste of human resources and included in that waste the idle rich, of whom 250,000 males between the ages of twenty and sixty-five, according to a census of 1891, were without trade or profession. Under-consumption, the corollary of unemployment, was the chief source of trouble and he saw imperialism, not as the white man’s burden nobly shouldered, but as the economy’s drive to compensate for markets missing at home. Hobson’s views, expressed in The Psychology of Jingoism in 1901 and Imperialism in 1902, were influential but offensive both to the imperialists and to the Fabians, who believed in imperialism. He was never offered a chair either by the major universities or by the London School of Economics, founded by the Fabians in 1894, to establish that new social science which was his goal.
What the Fabian Society wanted was Socialism without Marx or revolution, something like Macbeth without murder—an intellectual, respectable, gradual, factual, practical, “gas and water” English Socialism powered by the brains, hard work and infinite attention to detail of the Webbs and the brilliant common sense of Shaw. Founded in the eighties, expounding plans and arguments through the Fabian Tracts, it was an intellectual lobby bent on guiding existing political institutions toward the ultimate goals of Socialism. Fabians were the B’s in Beatrice Webb’s division of people into A’s (aristocrats, artists and anarchists) and B’s (benevolents, bourgeois and bureaucrats). They sought no working-class base but preferred to operate, as William Morris said, by “gradually permeating cultivated people with our own aspirations” and gradually influencing government toward their goals. They made splendid progress among those of their own kind but remained a scholastic regiment of seven or eight hundred, aloof from the people for whom they toiled. In England persons of the educated classes did not and could not penetrate the unions. Discrediting the Marxian dogma of mandatory class war, the Fabians believed that labourers and employees must gain their ends within the capitalist system because it was the employers’ surplus capital which gave them work. In his lectures “disproving” Marx, Shaw, a tall, reedy, red-haired figure, emphatic, provocative and bold, held listeners spellbound as he poured out ideas