From the first, such people fled
after one glance at us, declaring that we were not serious. Our
preference for practical suggestions and criticisms, and our
impatience of all general expressions of sympathy with working-class
aspirations, not to mention our way of chaffing our opponents in
preference to denouncing them as enemies of the human race, repelled
from us some warm-hearted and eloquent Socialists, to whom it seemed
callous and cynical to be even commonly self-possessed in the
presence of the sufferings upon which Socialists make war. But there
was far too much equality and personal intimacy among the Fabians to
allow of any member presuming to get up and preach at the rest in the
fashion which the working-classes still tolerate submissively from
their leaders. We knew that a certain sort of oratory was useful for
'stoking up' public meetings; but we needed no stoking up, and, when
any orator tried the process on us, soon made him understand that he
was wasting his time and ours. I, for one, should be very sorry to
lower the intellectual standard of the Fabian by making the
atmosphere of its public discussions the least bit more congenial to
stale declamation than it is at present. If our debates are to be
kept wholesome, they cannot be too irreverent or too critical. And
the irreverence, which has become traditional with us, comes down
from those early days when we often talked such nonsense that we
could not help laughing at ourselves.
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