Easy Does It

George Bernard Shaw, Sidney Webb and Quintus Fabius Maximus were born so long ago that they were not able to get to the meeting. But hundreds of other Fabians crowded solemnly into Albert

Hall to observe the diamond (60th) jubilee of an organization which led a major revolution without splitting an infinitive, breaking a teacup or exploding anything more lethal than an economic theory.

The Fabian Society had really been founded 62 years ago, but, because of the war, it delayed the celebration. The postponement was in character; Fabius Cunctator (The Delayer) had worn out Hannibal in the Second Punic War* by what Livy called "masterly inactivity." The earnest young men & women of the 1880s who believed that socialism (not the Marxist brand) would come with what Webb called the "inevitability of gradualness" took Fabius as their exemplar. They considered violent revolution unnecessary, believed their Utopia could be achieved by "permeating" existing institutions.

Very gradually, the Fabians and their allies persuaded British unions to form a Labor party, and gradually it wore down capitalism's power in capitalism's classic citadel.

The diamond jubilee was a jubilee indeed (in a restrained, Fabian way). Sir Thomas Beecham, who quit the Fabians because they slighted the arts, let bygones be bygones and conducted the overture to Die Meistersinger and the Fantasia from Tchaikovsky's Romeo and Juliet. As the music died away, the blue curtains parted. After a slight (inevitable) delay, the large balding head of Quintus Fabius Maximus' disciple Harold Laski popped through the white backdrop. Laski, peering over the big red carnation in his buttonhole, advanced to the rostrum followed by Prime Minister Attlee, Lord President of the Council Herbert Morrison, Food Minister John Strachey and Education Minister Ellen Wilkinson, all wearing red carnations.

Morrison described the Fabian way: "Discussion, argument, reading, research, often confined to small groups of people, are the sound foundations for a nation's advancing freedom and social responsibility. Attlee gave an account of the Society's history that might have been brighter. He omitted, for instance, Shaw's account of the dear, dead days when he, H. G. Wells, Beatrice and Sidney Webb and other veterans lived in an "eternal political shop . . . mornings of dogged writing, all in our separate rooms; our ravenous plain meals . . . Beatrice throwing away her pen and hurling herself on her husband in a shower of caresses which lasted until the passion for work resumed its sway." In 1896, wrote Shaw (whom serious Beatrice Webb regarded as "a sprite"--a sort of undine with only a slender connection with the world of mortals): "The Fabian old gang can only afford a country house for our holiday because one of us [Sidney Webb] has a wife with a thousand a year. This time we have been joined by an Irish millionairess--a great catch for somebody*--whom we have incorporated into our Fabian family with great success."

By 1946 the Fabians were constitutionally wedded to the British Treasury. Nearly every member of the present Government was either a member of the Fabian Society or had been consciously influenced by it. Webb, now 87, had long ago (1929) overcome his aversion to titles of nobility and reluctantly consented to become Baron Passfield (though the late Beatrice refused to become Lady Passfield). But Shaw, looking for new worlds to conquer, at 90, sent the meeting a telegram:

"The only message I have for the moment is that the Fabian Society, having made Russia a great Fabian state, has now to make Henry Wallace succeed Franklin Roosevelt as President of the United States."

As usual, there would be a slight delay.

* "Somebody" turned out to be Shaw, who married Miss Charlotte F. Payne-Townshend two years later. * Fabian Clement Attlee did his hero too much honor last week when, in a debate over whether the title "World War II" implied an inevitable World War III, Attlee told the House of Commons (most of whose members had known better since they were fifth formers): "As far as I know, there was a First and Second Punic War but not a third."

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