Anyway even with the small membership of those days, the London Groups
managed to persist, and "Fabian News" is full of reports of conferences
of Group Secretaries and accounts of Group activities. In the trough of
depression between the South African War and the Liberal victory of 1906
all this disappeared and the Group system scarcely existed even on
paper.
With the expansion which began in 1906 the Groups revived. New members
were hungry for lectures: many of them desired more opportunities to
talk than the Society meetings afforded. All believed in or hoped for
Mr. Wells' myriad membership. He himself was glad to address
drawing-room meetings, and the other leaders did the same. Moreover the
Society was conducting a series of "Suburban Lectures" by paid
lecturers, in more or less middle-class residential areas of the Home
Counties. Lectures to the Leisured Classes, a polite term for the idle
rich, were arranged with considerable success in the West End, and other
lectures, meetings, and social gatherings were incessant.
For co-ordinating these various bodies the Fabian Society has created
its own form of organisation fitted to its peculiar circumstances, and
more like that of the British Empire than anything else known to me. As
is the United Kingdom in the British Empire, so in the Fabian movement
the parent Society is larger, richer, and more powerful, and in all
respects more important than all the others put together.
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