ABSTRACT
In carrying on the history of the ‘Lib.-Labs.’ as far as the death of the Labour Electoral Association in 1895, have for convenience abandoned a strict historical sequence. It is necessary to go back in order to give an account of the little band of Socialist ‘intellectuals’ who founded the Fabian Society in 1883, and thereafter developed it into a body which was able to exert an influence on the British Socialist movement altogether out of proportion to its membership. Fabian Socialism was, indeed, evolutionary in its essence. As against the Marxist belief in a dialectical process of revolution, the Fabians advanced the view that Socialism could be made to grow gradually out of the existing institutions of society by a process of evolutionary development. In the middle ’eighties, some of the Fabians were for a time active in the Social Democratic Federation.
