lity of Human Nature to Systems of Just
Distribution, that I was able to handle Social-Democracy as it must
be handled before it can be preached in such a way as to present it
to every sort of man from his own particular point of view. In old
lecture lists of the Society you will find my name down for twelve
different lectures or so. Nowadays I have only one, for which the
secretary is good enough to invent four or five different names.
Sometimes I am asked for one of the old ones, to my great dismay, as
I forget all about them; but I get out of the difficulty by
delivering the new one under the old name, which does as well. I do
not hesitate to say that all our best lecturers have two or three old
lectures at the back of every single point in their best new
speeches; and this means that they have spent a certain number of
years plodding away at footling little meetings and dull discussions,
doggedly placing these before all private engagements, however
tempting. A man's Socialistic acquisitiveness must be keen enough to
make him actually prefer spending two or three nights a week in
speaking and debating, or in picking up social information even in
the most dingy and scrappy way, to going to the theatre, or dancing
or drinking, or even sweethearting, if he is to become a really
competent propagandist--unless, of course, his daily work is of such
a nature as to be in itself a training for political life; and that,
we know, is the case with very few of us indeed. It is at such
lecturing and debating work, and on squalid little committees and
ridiculous little delegations to conferences of the three tailors of
Tooley Street, with perhaps a deputation to the Mayor thrown in once
in a blue moon or so, that the ordinary Fabian workman or clerk must
qualify for his future seat on the Town Council, the School Board,
or perhaps in the Cabinet. It was in that way that Bradlaugh, for
instance, graduated from being a boy evangelist to being one of the
most formidable debaters in the House of Commons. And the only
opponents who have ever held their own against the Fabians in debate
have been men like Mr. Levy or Mr. Foote, who learnt in the same
school."

But lecturing was not the only activity of the Fabians. There were at
that time local Groups, each comprising one or a dozen constituencies in
London and its suburbs. The Groups in a