They were not modernists or new theologians but atheists, not Fabians or social reformers but revolutionary socialists armed with bombs, not radicals but republicans, not divorce-law-reformers but "free lovers."

We appeal to Bluebooks as confidently as to astronomers, assuming that their statements will be impersonally true, just as the curve of a comet will be the same for the Opposition as for the Government, for Anarchists as for Fabians.

I suppose also that the Fabians among ourselves would support the foreign domination, just as their leaders supported the overthrow of the Boer republics, on the ground that larger states bring the Fabianthe very Fabianrevolution nearer.

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.

We propose to begin again with the recognition of those same difficulties the Fabians first realised.

The superimposed social order of to-day, such as it is, with its huge development of expropriated labour, and the schemes of the later Fabians to fix this state of affairs in an organised form and render it plausibly tolerable, seem also doomed to accumulate catastrophic tensions.

All these fancies men feel should be private; and even Fabians have never proposed to interfere with them.