earnest
upon these long-shirked preliminary problems of human interaction
through which the vital problem of a collective head and brain can alone
be approached.

A considerable proportion of the socialist movement remains, as it has
been from the first, vaguely democratic. It points to collective
ownership with no indication of the administrative scheme it
contemplates to realise that intention. Necessarily it remains a
formless claim without hands to take hold of the thing it desires.
Indeed in a large number of cases it is scarcely more than a resentful
consciousness in the expropriated masses of social disintegration. It
spends its force very largely in mere revenges upon property as such,
attacks simply destructive by reason of the absence of any definite
ulterior scheme. It is an ill-equipped and planless belligerent who must
destroy whatever he captures because he can neither use nor take away. A
council of democratic socialists in possession of London would be as
capable of an orderly and sustained administration as the Anabaptists in
Munster. But the discomforts and disorders of our present planless
system do tend steadily to the development of this crude socialistic
spirit in the mass of the proletariat; merely vindictive attacks upon
property, sabotage, and the general strike are the logical and
inevitable consequences of an uncontrolled concentration of property in
a few hands, and such things must and will go on, the deep undertow in
the deliquescence of the Normal Social Life, until a new justice, a new
scheme of compensations and satisfactions is attained, or the Normal
Social Life re-emerges.

Fabian socialism was the first systematic attempt to meet the fatal
absence of administrative schemes in the earlier socialisms. It can
scarcely be regarded now as anything but an interesting failure, but a
failure that has all the educational value of a first reconnaissance
into unexplored territory. Starting from that attack on aggregating
property, which is the common starting-point of all socialist projects,
the Fabians, appalled at the obvious difficulties of honest
confiscation and an open transfer from private to public hands,
conceived the extraordinary idea of _filching_ property for the state. A
small body of people of extreme astuteness were to bring about the
municipalisation and nationalisation first of this great system of
property and then of that, in a manner so artful that the millionaires
were