“IF I had not fallen for G.K. in 1900 I should have been caught by the Webbs in 1910.” I quote this sentence from a letter recently received because it may remind many of a fate they also escaped. The Fabian, as we now know, did not offer an alternative to Capitalism, he offered fetters of security and sufficiency; a better ordered world of which, even before the war, there seemed a need. The slums were awful and the rich corrupt, we did not question the qualities of the Fabian remedy. The young were to be nourished in clinics and educated in schools, the unfit exterminated, the old fed and clothed like the lilies of the field, the dead collected by a municipal Carter Paterson. The people were to control the means of production and distribution, text books on economics were to replace the Bible and everything was to be efficient. Fabian tracts, black with statistics and documented to the nth degree, were found upon the bookstalls, experts became as eloquent as the blue books from which they preached. Sanitation was exalted into a religion and hygiene accepted among the gods. The whole was spiced, for those reaching the more active areas of propaganda, by a certain laxity in morals, an evidence of escape from Victorianism. This looseness was to be discouraged among the poor, who were to be kept sober if not righteous; though not godly they were to be maintained at least in health.

The lugubrious procession of economists, welfare workers, mother Grundies and busy bodies was held up by a circus.