ic purposes, wherever the collective organization of the
community is being employed in place of individual efforts,
wherever in the public interest, the free use of private land or
capital is being further restrained--there one more step toward the
complete realization of the Socialist Ideal is being taken."

The fight of the British Socialists has thus been directed from the
first almost exclusively against the abstraction, "individualism," and
not against the concrete thing, the capitalist class. John Morley had
said that the early Liberals, Cobden, Bright, and others, were
systematic and constructive, because they "surveyed society and
institutions as a whole," because they "connected their advocacy of
political and legal changes with theories of human nature," because they
"considered the great art of government in connection with the character
of man, his proper education, his potential capacities," and could
explain "in the large dialect of a definite scheme what were their aims
and whither they were going."

"Is there," Mr. Morley had asked, "any approach to such a body of
systematic political thought in our own day?" Mr. Webb announced that
the Fabians proposed to fill in this void. It was primarily system and
order rather than any particular principle at which he aimed. The
keynote of his system was to be opposition to the individualistic
_theory_ of the philosophic Liberals whom the Fabians hoped to succeed
rather than opposition to the _principles_ of capitalism, which lend
themselves equally well either to an individualistic or to a
collectivistic application.

Just as Mr. Webb is the leading publicist, so Mr. Bernard Shaw is the
leading writer, among the exponents of Fabian Socialism. It is now more
than twenty years since he also began idealizing the State, and he is
doing the same thing to-day. "Who is the people? What is the people?" he
asked in the Fabian Essays in 1889. "Tom we know, and Dick; also Harry;
but solely and separately as individuals: as a trinity they have no
existence. Who is their trustee, their guardian, their man of business,
their manager, their secretary, even their stockholder? The Socialist is
stopped dead at the threshold of practical action by this difficulty,
until he bethinks himself of the State as the representative and trustee
of the people."[128] It will be noticed that Mr. Shaw does not say the
State may become the representative and trustee of the