people, but that
it _is_ their representative. "Hegel," he continues, "expressly taught
the conception of the perfect State, and his disciples saw that nothing
in the nature of things made it possible or even difficult to make the
existing State if not absolutely perfect, at least trustworthy;" and
then, after alluding with the greatest brevity to the anti-democratic
elements of the British government, Mr. Shaw proceeds to develop at
great length the wonderful possibilities of the existing State as the
practically trustworthy trustee, guardian, man of business, manager,
secretary, and stockholder _of the people_.[129]

Yet Mr. Shaw says that a Social-Democrat is one "who _desires_ through
democracy _to_ gather the whole people into the State, so that the State
may be trusted with the rent of the country, and finally with the land
and capital and the organization of national industry." He reasons that
the transition to Socialism through gradual extensions of democracy and
State action had seriously begun forty-five years before the writing of
the Essays, that is, in the middle of the nineteenth century (when
scarcely one sixth of the adult male population of Great Britain had a
vote, and when, through the unequal election districts, the country
squires practically controlled the situation--W. E. W.). In Mr. Shaw's
reasoning, as in that of many other British Socialists, a very little
democracy goes a long way.[130]

Later Mr. Shaw repudiated democracy altogether, saying that despotism
fails only for want of a capable benevolent despot, and that what we
want nowadays is not a new or modern form of democracy, but only capable
benevolent representatives. He shelved his hopes for the old ideal,
government _by_ the people, by opposing to it a new ideal of a very
active and beneficent government _for_ the people. In "Fabianism and the
Empire" Shaw and his collaborators say frankly: "The nation makes no
serious attempt to democratize its government, because its masses are
still in so deplorable a condition that democracy, in the popular sense
of government by the masses, is clearly contrary to common sense."[131]

Mr. H. G. Wells, long a member of the Fabian Society, has well summed up
the character of what he calls this "opportunist Socialist group" which
has done so much to shape the so-called British Socialism. He says that
Mr. Sidney Webb was, during the first twenty years of his career "the
prevailing Fabian."