This is an abstract of a book on Fabian Socialism by Joan Veon. It is part of important research on Fabian Socialism.

p.263
Basis of the Fabian Society – Adopted May 23, 1919
“It therefore aims at the reorganization of Society by the emancipation of Land and Industrial Capital from individual ownership, and the vesting of them in the community for the general benefit. In this way only can the natural and acquired advantages of the country be equitably shared by the whole people?

“The Society accordingly works of the extinction of private property in land, with equitable consideration of established expectations. The Society is a constituent of the labour Party and the International Socialist Congress; but it takes part freely in all constitutional movements, social, economic and political….

Members of Fabian Socialist organization
Sir Normal Angell-Fabian; First Baron Ashbourne-Lord Chancellor of Ireland; Lord George Askwith – knight and peer; Lord Clement Richard Attlee – British statesman; First Earl of Arthur James Balfour – British statesmen and author of the Balfour Declaration, Jeremy Bentham – Founder of Radicalism; Annie Besant; one of seven Fabian essayists, supported birth control and joined the theosophy; Sir William Henry Beveridge – British economist; Prince Otto Bismarck – chancellor of the German Reich; Helena Petrovna Blavatsky – founder of the theosophic movement; George Cadbury-Founder of Cadbury chocolate and Quaker; Sir Ernest Cassel, great friend of Prince of Wales; Sir Neville Chamberlain – British statesman; Charles Darwin; Benjamin Disraeli, Prime Minister of England; Friedrich Engles, Felix Frankfurter-US jurist; Richard Haldane – co-founder of the University of London; Lord George Francis Hamilton-Chairman of the London School Board; Beatrice Hastings, defended Madame Blavatsky, Aldous Huxley, John Maynard Keynes; Harold Joseph Laski-member of the Fabian Society; Walter Lippman-American editor and journalist; James Ramsay MacDonald-British statesman; John Stuart Mill-economist; Karl Marx; Montagu Norman-Governor of the Bank of England; David Ricardo-economist; John Ruskin-painter; Bertrand Russell-writer; Disney and Beatrice Webb-founders of the Fabian society-given barony.

In 1945 394 members the Fabian Socialist Society were elected to the House of Commons. For the first time in British history, LABOR OR FABIAN SOCIALISM had come into power with a majority.

Belfor Bax described socialism as “Socialism is the system of society the material basis of which is social production for social use.” Graham Wallas, one of the founding Fabians described Socialism as “a movement towards economic equality to be achieved by democracy.” Sidney Webb, the most important Fabian thinker defined socialism as first the Fabians and thereafter British Labor saw it, “Socialism is the conscious and deliberate substitution, in industrial as well as political matters, of the collective self-government of the community as a whole, organized on a democratic basis for the individual control over other men’s lives, which the unrestrained private ownership of land and industrial capital inevitably involves.” 10

Today the Fabian Colonial Bureau is responsible for the briefing and must of the training of the local leadership in the new members of the British Commonwealth. 11

The complete reorientation and reorganization of England since WWII cannot be ascribed to any one cause. Two world wars and the Russian Revolution, together with the staggering increase in world population and the scientific discoveries which have underscored the abiding possibility of dictatorship, reducing space, time and the other areas in which the exercise of free will is possible, are obviously causes no less than they are effects. They were and are the wave of the Welfare State and of the Socialist ideal. 12

G. M. Trevelyn called the Fabians “intelligence officers without an army who influenced the strategy and even the direction of the great hosts moving under other banners.” For the Fabians never became a political [party, never ran a single candidate for Parliament as a Fabian; their speakers never urged anyone to become a Fabian or to join the Society.” 13

The tools forged by the Fabians to do the job they had set themselves that of socializing Britain, did just that job. These tools were three in number: the Labor Party, the New Statesman, The Labor Party, founded jointly by the Fabians and the trade unions, always had two wings, the “gas and water” Fabian wing, and the doctrinaire Socialism of the Trade Unions Council, these two wings have kept apart and distinct. The London School of Economics, founded by the Webbs in 1895, has never been Socialist directed, although it has always had Socialists on its staff and has “raised” and trained many, if not all of the Socialist leaders. 15

GBSHAW – “Socialism implies the introduction of design, contrivance and co-ordination, by a nation consciously seeking its own collective welfare, into the present industrial scramble for private gain.”

Keith Hutchison, “The paradoxical mission of 19th century liberalism was to create both the free market economy and the democracy that was to destroy it.” 25

Shaw has described in The Fabian Society: What it has done and how it has done it:
“A man’s Socialistic acquisitiveness must be keen enough to make him actually prefer spending two or three nights a week speaking and debating or in picking up social information even in the most dingy and scrappy way…it is at such lecturing and debating work and on squalid little committees and ridiculous little delegations to conferences of the three tailors of Tooley Street, with perhaps a deputation to the Mayor thrown in once in a blue moon, that the ordinary Fabian workman or clerk must qualify for his future set on the Town Council, the School Board or perhaps the Cabinet. 36

Annie Bessant’s conversion to Socialism and more specifically to Fabianism brought to the Society its first celebrity. She not only had then been stumping the country advocating atheism, but also birth control. 59

George Bernard Shaw went on to say that communism was implying successful Fabianism and that over Lenin’s great tomb should be written “the inevitability of gradualness.” Mr. Stalin, he pointed out, “had a vivid remembrance of the time when we spend a hundred million of our money to destroy the Soviet Government. 251

The Russians could not believe their eyes when they saw the Webbs alive, for Lenin had translated their books in the 1890s’ 252

In 1945 the 203 Fabians out of the 394 elected to the House of Commons were this time in power. The triumphant Labor Government succeeded in nationalizing:
1. The bank of England 2. Cables and wireless
3. Civil aviation 4. Transportation
5. Coal mines 6 Electricity
7. Gas 8. Medical Services.