ns the spreading of knowledge of facts. Statistics may be
called the dogma that knowledge is dynamic--that it is somehow operative
in bringing about that great change which all intelligent people desire
(and which the Fabians conceived as Socialism). The Fabian Society was
founded on the dogma of statistics as on a rock. The Fabians did not
start a newspaper, nor create a new political party, nor organize public
meetings; but they wrote to the newspapers already in existence, ran for
office on party tickets already in the field, and made speeches to other
organizations. That is to say, they went about like the cuckoo, laying
their statistical eggs in other people's nests and expecting to see them
hatch into enlightened public opinion and progressive legislation.

Some of them hatched and some of them didn't. The point is that we have
in this section of Beatrice Webb's career something typical of herself.
She has gone on, serving on government commissions, writing (with her
husband) the history of Trades Unionism, patiently collecting statistics
and getting them printed in black ink on white paper, making detailed
plans for the abolition of poverty, and always concerning herself with
the homely fact.

At the time that Beatrice Potter joined Mr. Booth in his social
investigations there was a 16-year-old Jewish girl living in the
German-Russian province of Kurland. A year later, in 1886, this girl,
Emma Goldman by name, came to America, to escape the inevitable
persecutions attending on any lover of liberty in Russia. She had been
one of those who had gone "to the people"; and it was as a working girl
that she came to America.

She had, that is to say, the heightened sensibilities, the keen
sympathies, of the middle class idealist, and the direct contact with
the harsh realities of our social and industrial conditions which is the
lot of the worker. Her first experiences in America disabused her of the
traditional belief that America was a refuge where the oppressed of all
lands were welcome. The treatment of immigrants aboard ship, the
humiliating brutalities of the officials at Castle Garden, and the
insolent tyranny of the New York police convinced her that she had
simply come from one oppressed land to another.

She went to work in a clothing factory, her wages being $2.50 a week.
She had ample opportunities to see the degradations of our economic
system, especially as it affects women. So it was not strange that sh