t
of their volume was far less understood by the public than is
Syndicalism at the present day. And yet a six-shilling book, published
at a private dwelling-house and not advertised in the press, or taken
round by travellers to the trade, sold almost as rapidly as if the
authors had been Cabinet Ministers.

A second edition of 1000 copies was issued in March, 1890: in September
Mr. Walter Scott undertook the agency of a new shilling paper edition,
5000 of which were sold before publication and some 20,000 more within a
year. In 1908 a sixpenny paper edition with a new preface by the editor
was issued by Walter Scott, of which 10,000 were disposed of in a few
months, and in all some 46,000 copies of the book have been sold in
English editions alone. It is difficult to trace the number of foreign
editions and translations. The authors made over to the Society all
their rights in the volume, and permission for translation and for
publication in the United States has always been freely given. In that
country we can trace an edition in 1894, published by Charles E. Brown
of Boston, with an Introduction by Edward Bellamy and a Preface of some
length on the Fabian Society and its work by William Clarke: and another
edition in 1909, published by the Ball Publishing Company of Boston,
also with the Introduction on the Fabian Society. A Dutch translation by
F.M. Wibaut was published in 1891; in 1806 the Essays, translated into
Norwegian by Francis Wolff, appeared as a series of small books; and in
1897 a German translation by Dora Lande was issued by G.H. Wigand of
Leipzig.

The effect of "Fabian Essays" arose as much from what it left out as
from what it contained. Only the fast-dwindling band of pioneer
Socialists, who lived through the movement in its earliest days, can
fully realise the environment of ideas from which "Fabian Essays" showed
a way of escape.

The Socialism of the Social Democratic Federation and the Socialist
League, the two societies which had hitherto represented Socialism to
the general public, was altogether revolutionary. Socialism was to be
the result of an outbreak of violence, engineered by a great popular
organisation like that of the Chartists or the Anti-Corn Law League, and
the Commune of Paris in 1871 was regarded as a premature attempt which
pointed the way to future success. The Socialist Government thus
established was to reconstruct the social and industrial life of the
nation according to