onfident that if their own political theories were right,
science would confirm them, and if they were wrong, it was better that
they should be discredited. The London School of Economics, though thus
founded, has never had any direct or organic connection with the Fabian
Society, and therefore any further account of its successful career
would be out of place in this volume. But it may be said that it has
certainly more than justified the hopes of its founders, or rather, to
be accurate, I should say, founder, since the other trustees were wholly
guided by the initiative of Sidney Webb.

Besides the School, and the Library connected with it, the Trust
promoted for many years regular courses of Fabian educational lectures
on social and political subjects, such as Socialism, Trade Unionism,
Co-operation, Poor Law, Economics, and Economic History. Lecturers were
selected with care, and were in some cases given a maintenance allowance
during the preparation of their lectures. Then arrangements were made
for courses of four lectures each, on what may be called University
Extension lines, in four or five centres in one part of the country. For
example, in the year 1896-7 180 lectures were given in fifty towns, half
of them under the auspices of branches of the I.L.P., and the rest
organised by Co-operative Societies, Liberal Associations, Trade Unions,
and other bodies. Very careful syllabuses were prepared and widely
circulated, and the whole scheme was intended to be educational rather
than directly propagandist. The first lecturers engaged were J. Ramsay
Macdonald and Miss Enid Stacy, whose premature death, a few years after
her marriage to the Rev. Percy Widdrington, was a great loss to the
movement. This lecturing was maintained for many years. In 1900, shortly
after the creation there of County and District Councils, we
experimented upon Ireland, where J. Bruce Glasier and S.D. Shallard gave
a number of courses of lectures, without any very obvious results. In
1902 W. Stephen Sanders took over the work, but the fund was coming to
an end, and after 1904 subsidised lecturing virtually ceased.

* * * * *

In order to help working-class students who had the desire to study more
continuously than by attendance at lectures, correspondence classes were
started in the same class of subject as the lectures. A textbook was
selected and divided into sections, to each of which an introduction was
w