senting not the small capitalists, but the landed nobility and
gentry] to make the first start." And there is little doubt that both
the provision of houses for the working people and the public feeding of
school children rest on precisely the same principles as the social
reforms now being undertaken by national governments, such as that of
Great Britain, and are, indeed, the "right sort of Socialism" from the
capitalist standpoint.

Taking the municipal reformer as a type of the so-called Socialist, Mr.
Belloc, a prominent Liberal Member of Parliament and an anti-Socialist,
says that "in the atmosphere in which he works and as regards the
susceptibilities which he fears to offend," that the municipal Socialist
is entirely of the capitalist class. "You cannot make revolutions
without revolutionaries," he continues, "and anything less revolutionary
than your municipal reformer never trod the earth. The very conception
is alien to this class of persons; usually he is desperately frightened
as well. Yet it is quite certain that so vast a change as Socialism
presupposes cannot be carried out without hitting. When one sees it
verbally advocated (and in practice shirked) by men who have never hit
anything in their lives, and who are even afraid of a scene with a
waiter in a restaurant, one is not inclined to believe in the reality of
the creed." Mr. Belloc concludes finally that all that this kind of
Socialism has done during its moments of greatest activity has tended
merely to recognize the capitalist more and more and to stereotype the
gulf between him and the other classes.[142]

And just as Mr. Belloc has reproached the Socialists for their
conservatism, so the _New Age_ and other mouthpieces of Socialism
condemn the non-Socialist radicals who constitute one of the chief
elements among the supporters of the present government (including Mr.
Belloc) as being too radical. In the literature of the Fabian Society
also, the accusation against the Liberals of being too revolutionary is
quite frequent. Years ago Mr. Sidney Webb accused them of having "the
revolutionary tradition in their bones," of conceiving society as "a
struggle of warring interests," and said that they would reform
_nothing_ "unless it be done at the expense of their enemies." While
this latter accusation is scarcely true, either of the British Liberals
or of the revolutionary Socialists of the Continent, it is obvious that
the _most important_ reforms of