" In fact of
course the percentage which retains its membership is very small. "Men"
and women at Universities join any organisation whose leaders at the
moment are influential and popular. They are sampling life to discover
what suits them, and a few years later some of them are scattered over
the globe, others immersed in science or art, or wholly occupied in law
and medicine, in the church and the army, in the civil service and in
journalism. Most of them no doubt have ceased to pretend to take
interest in social and political reform. A few remain, and these are
amongst the most valuable of our members. At times, when an
undergraduate of force of character and high social position, the heir
to a peerage for example, is for the moment an ardent Socialist, the
Fabian Society becomes, in a certain set or college, the fashionable
organisation. On the whole it is true that Socialists are born and not
made, and very few of the hundreds who join at such periods stay for
more than a couple of years. The maximum University membership--on
paper--was in 1914, when it reached 541 members, of whom 101 were at
Oxford and 70 at Cambridge. But the weakness of undergraduate Socialism
is indicated by the extraordinary difficulty found in paying to the
parent Society the very moderate fee of a shilling a head per annum, and
the effect of attempting to enforce this in 1915, combined with the
propaganda of Guild Socialism, especially at Oxford, was for the moment
to break up the apparently imposing array of University Fabianism.
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