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 school-boy's first
dark-lantern. Socialism ceased to be an open revolution, and became 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
bureaucracy, and since Socialism is essentially 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 further 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." It was another
instance of Socialism losing sight of itself, it was a process quite
parallel at the other extreme with the self-contradiction of the
Anarchist-Socialist. Socialism as distinguished from mere Liberalism,
for example, is an organized plan for social reconstruction, while
Liberalism relies upon certain vague "principles"; Socialism declares
that good intentions and doing what comes first to hand will not
suffice. Now Opportunism is essentially benevolent adventure and the
doing of first-hand things.

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. Webb himself devoted
immense industry and capacity to the London County Council--it is
impossible to measure the share he has had in securing such great
public utilities as water supply, traction and electric supply, for
example, from complete exploitation by private profit seekers, but
certainly it is a huge one--and throughout England and presently in
America, there went on a collateral activity of Fabian Socialists.
They worked like a ferment in municipal politics, encouraging and
developing local pride and local enterprise in public works. In the
case of larg