Londoners no doubt see little of organised labour, and even less of
industrial co-operation: the agricultural labourer is to them almost a
foreigner: the Welsh miner belongs to another race. But the business
men, the professional class, and the political organisers of Manchester
and Glasgow have, in my opinion, no better intuitions, and usually less
knowledge than their equivalents in London, and they have the
disadvantage of comparative isolation. London, the brain of the Empire,
where reside the leaders in politics and in commerce, in literature, in
journalism and in art, and which consequently attracts the young men who
aspire to be the next generation of leaders, where too are stationed all
the higher ranks of Civil Service, is different in kind, as well as in
size, from other cities. New thought on social subjects is almost always
the product of association. Only those who live in a crowd of other
thinkers know where there is room for new ideas; for it takes years for
the top layer of political thought to find expression in books.
Therefore the provincial thinker on social problems is always a little
out of date. Except for one or two University men (e.g. Sidney Ball and
Sir Oliver Lodge) practically all Fabian tract-writers have been
Londoners. The local Fabian Societies have so far achieved nothing
towards the making of a middle-class Socialist party, and they have
achieved but little else.
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