"His insistence upon continuity pervaded the Society, was re-echoed
and intensified by others, and developed into something like a
mania for achieving Socialism _without the overt change of any
existing ruling body_. His impetus carried this reaction against
the crude democratic idea to its extremest opposite. Then arose
Webbites to caricature Webb. From saying that the unorganized
people cannot achieve Socialism, they passed to the implication
that organization alone, without popular support, might achieve
Socialism. Socialism was to arrive as it were _insidiously_.

"To some minds this new proposal had the charm of a schoolboy's
first dark lantern. Socialism ceased to be an open revolution, and
become a plot. Functions were to be shifted, quietly,
unostentatiously, from the representative to the official he
appointed; a bureaucracy was to slip into power through the
mechanical difficulties of an administration by debating
representatives; and since these officials would, by the nature of
their positions, constitute a scientific government as
distinguished from haphazard government, they would necessarily run
the country on the lines of a _pretty distinctly undemocratic
Socialism_.

"The process went even farther than secretiveness in its reaction
from the _large rhetorical forms of revolutionary Socialism_. There
arose even a _repudiation of 'principles' of action_, and a type of
worker which proclaimed itself 'Opportunist-Socialist.' This
conception of indifference to the forms of government, of accepting
whatever governing bodies existed and using them to create
officials and '_get something done_,' was at once immediately
fruitful in many directions, and presently productive of many very
grave difficulties in the path of advancing Socialism." (Italics
mine.)[132]

Besides the obvious absurdities of such tactics, Mr. Wells points out
that they ignored entirely that reconstruction of legislative and local
government machinery which is very often an indispensable preliminary to
Socialization. He is speaking of such Socialism when he says:--

"Socialism has concerned itself only with the material
reorganization of Society and its social consequences, with
economic changes and the reaction of these changes on
administrative work; it has either accept