Indeed, they were generally preaching themselves on Sundays.
To describe them as irreligious in view of their work would be silly;
but until Hubert Bland towards the end of his life took refuge in the
Catholic Church, and Mrs. Besant devoted herself to Theosophy, no
leading Fabian found a refuge for his soul in the temples of any
established denomination. I may go further and admit that the first
problems the Fabians had to solve were so completely on the materialist
plane that the atmosphere inevitably became uncongenial to those whose
capacity was wasted and whose sympathies were starved on that plane.
Even psychical research, with which Pease and Podmore varied their
Fabian activities, tended fatally towards the exposure of alleged
psychical phenomena as physical tricks. The work that came to our hands
in our first two decades was materialistic work; and it was not until
the turn of the century brought us the Suffrage movement and the Wells
raid, that the materialistic atmosphere gave way, and the Society began
to retain recruits of a kind that it always lost in the earlier years as
it lost Mrs. Besant and (virtually) William Clarke. It is certainly
perceptibly less hard-headed than it was in its first period.
B
ON GUILD SOCIALISM
Here I venture to say, with some confidence, that Mr. Barker is
mistaken. That storm has burst on the Fabian Society and has left it
just where it was.
Pages:
302
303
304
305
306
307
308
309
310
311
312
313
314
315
316
317
318
319
320
321
322
323
324
325
326