alism into
Administrative Socialism.

This new development was essentially the outcome of the reaction of
its broad suggestions of economic reconstruction upon the circle of
thought of one or two young officials of genius, and of one or two
persons upon the fringe of that politic-social stratum of Society, the
English "governing class." I make this statement, I may say, in the
loosest possible spirit. The reaction is one that was not confined to
England, it was to some extent inevitable wherever the new movement in
thought became accessible to intelligent administrators and officials.
But in the peculiar atmosphere of British public life, with its
remarkable blend of individual initiative and a lively sense of the
State, this reaction has had the freest development. There was,
indeed, Fabianism before the Fabian Society; it would be ingratitude
to some of the most fruitful social work of the middle Victorian
period to ignore the way in which it has contributed in suggestion and
justification to the Socialist synthesis. The city of Birmingham, for
example, developed the most extensive process of municipalization as
the mere common-sense of local patriotism. But the movement was
without formulae and correlation until the Fabians came.

That unorganized, unpaid public service of public-spirited
aristocratic and wealthy financial and business people, the "governing
class," which dominated the British Empire throughout the nineteenth
century, has, through the absence of definite class boundaries in
England and the readiness of each class to take its tone from the
class above, that "Snobbishness" which is so often heedlessly
dismissed as altogether evil, given a unique quality to British
thought upon public questions and to British conceptions of Socialism.
It has made the British mind as a whole "administrative." As compared
with the American mind, for example, the British is State-conscious,
the American State-blind. The American is no doubt intensely
patriotic, but the nation and the State to which his patriotism points
is something overhead and comprehensive like the sky, like a flag
hoisted; something, indeed, that not only does not but must not
interfere with his ordinary business occupations. To have public
spirit, to be aware of the State as a whole and to have an
administrative feeling towards it, is necessarily to be accessible to
constructive ideas--that is to say, to Socialistic ideas. In the
history of thought