GEORGE BERNARD SHAW

GEORGE BERNARD SHAW ON

BEATRICE WEBB AND SYDNEY WEBB

FROM HIS INTRODUCTION TO WEBB'S BOOK

'THE TRUTH ABOUT SOVIET UNION' WRITTEN IN 1942

THE WEBBS

By G. BERNARD SHAW

The Webbs, Sidney and Beatrice, officially The Right Honourable the Baron and Lady Passfield,are a superextraordinary pair. I have never met anyone Kke them, either separately or in their most

fortunate conjunction. Each of them is an EngLish force; and their marriage was an irresistible reinforcement Only England could have produced them.

It is true that France produced the

Curies, a pair equally happily matched; but in

physics they found an established science and

left it so, enriched as it was by their labors; but

the Webbs found British Constitutional politics

something which nobody had yet dreamt of call-

ing a science or thinking of as such.

When they began, they were face to face with^

Capitalism and Marxism. Marxism, though it

claims to be scientific, and has proved itself a

mighty force in the modern world, was then a phi-

losophy propounded by a foreigner without ad-

ministrative experience, who gathered his facts in

the Reading Room of the British Museum, and

generalized the human race under the two heads

of bourgeoisie and proletariat apparently without

having ever come into business contact with a liv-

ing human being.

5

6 THE TRUTH ABOUT SOVIET RUSSIA

The Quarrel with Capitalism

Capitalism was and is a paper Utopia, the most

unreal product of wishful thinking of all the Uto-

pias. By pure logic, without a moment's reference

to the facts, it demonstrated that you had only to

enforce private contracts and let everybody buy

in the cheapest market and sell in the dearest to

produce automatically a condition in which there

would be no unemployment, and every honest and

industrious person would enjoy a sufficient wage

to maintain himself and his wife and reproduce his

kind, whilst an enriched superior class would have

leisure and means to preserve and develop the na-

tion's culture and civilization, and, by receiving

more of the national income than they could pos-

sibly consume, save all the capital needed to make

prosperity increase by leaps and bounds,

What Karl Marx Did

Karl Marx's philosophy had no effect on public

opinion here or elsewhere; but when he published

the facts as to the condition to which Capitalism

had reduced the masses, it was like lifting the lid

off hell. Capitalism has not yet recovered from

the shock of that revelation, and never will.

Sixty years ago, the Marxian shock was only be-

ginning to operate in England. I had to read Das

Kapital in a French translation, there being no

English version as yet. A new champion of the

people, Henry Mayers Hyndman, had met and

THE WEBBS 7

talked with Karl Marx. They quarrelled, as their

habit was, but not before Hyndman had been com-

pletely converted by Marx; so his Democratic

Federation presently became a Social-Democratic

Federation. Socialism, in abeyance since the

slaughter of the Paris Commune in 1871, suddenly

revived; but Marx, its leader and prophet, died at

that moment and left the movement to what lead-

ership it could get.

Socialism was not a new thing peculiar to Marx.

John Stuart Mill, himself a convert, had converted

others, among them one very remarkable young

man and an already famous elderly one. The

elderly one was the great poet and craftsman Wil-

liam Morris, who, on reading Mill's early somewhat

halfhearted condemnation of communism, at once

declared that Mill's verdict was against the evi-

dence, and that people who lived on unearned in-

comes were plainly "damned thieves." He joined

Hyndman, and when the inevitable quarrel en-

sued, founded The Socialist League.

Sidney Webb, the Prodigy

The younger disciple had followed Mill's con-

version and shared it. His name was Sidney

Webb. He was an entirely unassuming young

Londoner of no extraordinary stature, guiltless of

any sort of swank, and so naively convinced that

he was an ordinary mortal and everybody else as

gifted as himself that he did not suffer fools gladly,

8 THE TRUTH ABOUT SOVIET RUSSIA

and was occasionally ungracious to the poor things.

The unassuming young cockney was in fact a

prodigy. He could read a book as fast as he could

turn die leaves, and remember everything worth

remembering in it. Whatever country he was in,

he spoke the language with perfect facility, though

always in the English manner. He had gone

through his teens gathering scholarships and ex-

hibitions as a child gathers daisies, and had landed

at last in the upper division of the civil service as

resident clerk in the Colonial Office. He had ac-

quired both scholarship and administrative experi-

ence, and knew not only why reforms were desir-

able but how they were put into practice under our

queer political system. Hyndman and his Demo-

cratic Federation were no use to him, Morris and

his Socialist League only an infant school. There

was no organization fit for him except the Liberal

Party, already moribund, but still holding a front

bench position under the leadership of Gladstone.

All Webb could do was something that he was for-

bidden to do as a civil servant: that is, issue pam-

phlets warning the Liberal Party that they were

falling behind the times and even behind the Con-

servatives. Nevertheless he issued the pamphlets

calmly. Nobody dared to remonstrate.

G. B. S. Meets the Man he Sought

This was the situation when I picked him up at

a debating society which I had joined to qualify

THE WEBBS 9

myself as a public speaker. It was the year 1879,

when I was 23 and he a year or two younger. I at

once recognized and appreciated in him all the

qualifications in which I was myself pitiably de-

ficient. He was clearly the man for me to work

with. I forced my acquaintance on him; and it

soon ripened into an enduring friendship. This

was by far the wisest step I ever toolc The com-

bination worked perfectly.

We were both in the same predicament in hav-

ing no organization with which we could work.

Our job was to get Socialism into some sort of work- ing shape; and we knew that this brainwork must be done by groups of Socialists whose minds operated at the same speed on a foundation of the same culture and habits. We were not snobs; but

neither were we mere reactionists against snobbery to such an extent as to believe that we could work

in double harness with the working men of the

Federation and the League, who deeply and wisely

mistrusted us as "bourgeois/' and who would in-

evitably waste our time in trying to clear up hope-

less misunderstandings. Morris was soon com-

pletely beaten by his proletarian comrades: he

had to drop the League, which immediately per-

ished. The agony of the Social-Democratic Fed-

eration was longer drawn out; but it contributed

nothing to the theory or practice of Socialism, and

hardly even pretended to survive the death of

Hyndman.

10 THE TRUTH ABOUT SOVIET RUSSIA

The Fabian Society's Rise to Power

One day I came upon a tract entitled Why Are

The Many Poor? issued by a body of whom I had

never heard, entitled The Fabian Society. The

name struck me as an inspiration. I looked the

Society up, and found a little group of educated

middle class persons who, having come together

to study philosophy, had finally resolved to take to

active politics as Socialists. It was just what we

needed. When I had sized it up, Webb joined,

and with him Sydney Olivier, his fellow resident

clerk at the Colonial Office. Webb swept every-

thing before him; and the history of the Fabian

Society began as the public knows it today. Bar-

ricades manned by Anarchists, and Utopian colo-

nies, vanished from the Socialist program; and

Socialism became constitutional, respectable, and

practical This was the work of Webb far more

than of any other single person.

Marriage to Beatrice Potter

He was still a single person in another sense

when the Fabian job was done. He was young

enough to be unmarried when a young lady as

rarely qualified as himself decided that he was old

enough to be married. She had arrived at Social-

ism not by way of Karl Marx or John Stuart Mill,

but by her own reasoning and observation. She

was not a British Museum theorizer and book-

THE WEBBS 11

worm; she was a born firsthand investigator. She

had left the West End, where she was a society

lady of the political plutocracy, for the East End,

where she disguised herself to work in sweaters*

dens and investigate the condition of the sub-

merged tenth just discovered by Charles Booth

and the Salvation Army. The sweaters found her

an indifferent needlewoman, but chose her as an

ideal bride for Ikey Mo: a generic name for their

rising sons. They were so pressing that she had

to bring her investigation to a hasty end, and seek

the comparatively aristocratic society of the trade

union secretaries, with whom she hobnobbed as

comfortably as if she had been born in their houses.

She had written descriptions of the dens for Booth's

first famous Enquiry, and a history of Cooperation

which helped powerfully to shift its vogue from

producers' cooperation to consumers' coopera-

tion. Before her lay the whole world of proletar-

ian organization to investigate.

It was too big a job for one worker. She re-

solved to take a partner. She took a glance at the

Fabian Society, now two thousand strong, and at

once dismissed nineteen hundred and ninety-six of

them as negligible sheep ; but it was evident that

they were not sheep without a shepherd. There

were in fact some half-dozen shepherds. She in-

vestigated them personally one after the other, and

with unerring judgment selected Sidney Webb,

and gathered him without the least difficulty, as he

12 THE TRUTH ABOUT SOVIET RUSSIA

had left himself defenseless by falling in love with

her head over ears.

Their Literary Partnership

And so the famous partnership began. He took

to her investigation business like a duck to water.

They started with a history of trade unionism so

complete and intimate in its information that it

reduced all previous books on the subject to waste

paper, and made organized labor in England class-

conscious for tbe first time. It travelled beyond

England and was translated by Lenin. Then came

the volume on Industrial Democracy which took

trade unionism out of its groove and made it politi-

cally conscious of its destiny. There followed a

monumental history of Local Government which

ran into many volumes, and involved such a pro-

gram of investigations on the spot all over the coun-

try, and reading through local archives., as had

never before been attempted. Under such han-

dling not only Socialism but political sociology in

general became scientific, leaving Marx and Las-

salle almost as far behind in that respect as they

had left Robert Owen, The labor of it was pro-

digious; but it was necessary. And it left the

Webbs no time for argybargy as between Marx's

Hegelian metaphysics and Max Eastman's Carte-

sian materialism. The question whether Social-

ism is a soulless Conditioned Reflex d la Pavlov or

the latest phase of The Light of the World an-

THE WEBBS IS

notmced by St. John, did not delay them: they

kept to the facts and the methods suggested by the

facts*

Finally came the work in which those who be-

lieve in Divine Providence may like to see its finger.

The depth and genuineness of our Socialism found

its crucial test in the Russian revolution which

changed crude Tsarism into Red Communism.

After the treaty of Brest Litovsk, Hyndman, our

arch-Marxist, denounced it more fiercely than

Winston Churchill The history of Communist

Russia for the past twenty years in the British and

American Press is a record in recklessly prejudiced

mendacity. The Webbs waited until the wreck-

age and ruin of the change was ended, its mis-

takes remedied, and the Communist State fairly

launched. Then they went and investigated it

In their last two volumes they give us the first really

scientific analysis of the Soviet State, and of its

developments of our political and social experi-

ments and institutions, including trade unionism

and cooperation, which we thought they had abol-

ished. No Russian could have done this all-

important job for us. The Webbs knew England,

and knew what they were talking about. No one

else did.

They unhesitatingly gave the Soviet system their

support, and announced it definitely as a New

Civilization.

It has been a wonderful life's work. Its mere

14 THE 'TRUTH ABOUT SOVIET RUSSIA

incidental by-blows included Webb's chairman-

ship of the London County Council's Technical

Education Committee which abolished the old

Schoolboard, the creation of the London School of

Economics, the Minority Report which dealt a

death blow to the iniquitous Poor Law, and such

comparative trifles as the conversion of bigoted

Conversative constituencies into safe Labor seats,

and a few years spent by Webb in the two Houses

of Parliament. They were the only years he ever

wasted. He was actually compelled by the Labor

Government to accept a peerage; but nothing

could induce Beatrice to change die name she had

made renowned throughout Europe for the title

of Lady Passfield, who might be any nobody.

For the private life of the Webbs, I know all

about it, and can assure you that it is utterly void of

those scandalous adventures which make private

lives readable. Mr. Webb and Miss Potter are

now Darby and Joan: that is all

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