eed to establish its Parliamentary Fund by which salaries
for their M.P.'s were provided until Parliament itself undertook the
business.

For several years after this the Fabian Society did not greatly concern
itself with the Labour Party. I attended the Annual Conferences and took
a regular part in the work of the Executive Committee, but my
colleagues of the Fabian Society as a whole showed little interest in
the new body. In a sense, it was not in our line. Its object was to
promote Labour Representation in Parliament, and the Fabian Society had
never run, and had never intended to run, candidates for Parliament or
for any local authority. We had made appeals for election funds on a
good many occasions and had succeeded once or twice in collecting
substantial sums, but this was a very different matter from accepting
responsibility for a candidate and his election expenses. Therefore, for
a good while, we remained in a position of benevolent passivity.

The Labour Representation Committee was founded as a Group, not as a
Party, and one of the two members elected under its auspices at the
General Election of 1900 ran as a Liberal. In 1903 it transformed itself
into a Party, and then began the somewhat strange anomaly that the
Fabian Society as a whole was affiliated to the Labour Party, whilst
some of its members were Liberal Members of Parliament. It is true that
the Trade Unions affiliated to the party were in the same position:
their members also were sometimes official Liberals and even Liberal
M.P.'s. The Labour Party itself never complained of the anomaly in the
position of the Society or questioned its collective loyalty. And the
Liberals in our Society never took any action hostile to the Labour
Party, or indeed, so far as I know, supported any of the proposals
occasionally made that we should disaffiliate from it. These proposals
always came from "Fabian reformers," the younger men who wanted to
create a revolution in the Society. And so little was their policy
matured that in several cases the same member first tried to get the
Society to expel all members who worked with any party other than the
Labour Party, and a short time later moved that the Society should
leave the Labour Party altogether. Or perhaps it was the other way
round. Logical consistency is usually incompatible with political
success: compromise runs smooth, whilst principle jams. But the lesser
sort of critic, on the look out for a grievanc