edom to try
new social experiments and reform obsolete institutions, in snobbery,
jobbery, idolatry, and an omnipresent tyranny in which his doctor and
his schoolmaster, his lawyer and his priest, coerce him worse than
any official or drill sergeant: no matter: it is respectable, says the
German, therefore it must be good, and cannot be carried too far;
and everybody who rebels against it must be a rascal. Even the
Social-Democrats in Germany differ from the rest only in carrying
academic orthodoxy beyond human endurance--beyond even German endurance.
I am a Socialist and a Democrat myself, the hero of a hundred platforms,
one of the leaders of the most notable Socialist organizations in
England. I am as conspicuous in English Socialism as Bebel is in German
Socialism; but do you suppose that the German Social-Democrats tolerate
me? Not a bit of it. I have begged again and again to be taken to the
bosom of my German comrades. I have pleaded that the Super-Proletarians
of all lands should unite. I have pointed out that the German
Social-Democratic party has done nothing at its Congresses for the last
ten years except the things I told them to do ten years before, and that
its path is white with the bones of the Socialist superstitions I and my
fellow Fabians have slain. Useless. They do not care a rap whether I
am a Socialist or not. All they want to know is; Am I orthodox? Am I
correct in my revolutionary views? Am I reverent to the revolutionary
authorities? Because I am a genuine free-thinker they look at me as a
policeman looks at a midnight prowler or as a Berlin bourgeois looks
at a suspicious foreigner. They ask "Do you believe that Marx was
omniscient and infallible; that Engels was his prophet; that Bebel and
Singer are his inspired apostles; and that Das Kapital is the Bible?"
Hastening in my innocence to clear myself of what I regard as an
accusation of credulity and ignorance, I assure them earnestly that
I know ten times as much of economics and a hundred times as much of
practical administration as Marx did; that I knew Engels personally and
rather liked him as a witty and amiable old 1848 veteran who despised
modern Socialism; that I regard Bebel and Singer as men of like passions
with myself, but considerably less advanced; and that I read Das Kapital
in the year 1882 or thereabouts, and still consider it one of the
most important books of the nineteenth century because of its power
of changing the minds o