ABSTRACT
Apart from one reference to the foreign policy of the Manchester School, the original volume of Fabian Essays never mentions the world outside Britain except to point a domestic moral. Indeed, this sort of parochialism was the Fabians’ greatest strength. They found socialism wandering aimlessly in Cloud Cuckoo land and set it working on gas and water problems of the nearest town or village. The modern Welfare State is their monument. The foreign policies of the British parties bear out these generalisations. The Conservatives have a congenital grasp of the rules of thumb for protecting British interests as defined in the Victorian heyday. But they are slow to recognise changes in those interests and even slower to understand changes in the world within which their rules of thumb must be applied. Most British socialists had been preaching for years that war was inevitable consequence of capitalism and that no capitalist government could be trusted to use power for peaceful ends.
