“But collectivism also demands in the second place expert government.  It demands the ‘aristocracy of talent’ of which Carlyle wrote.  The control of a State with powers so vast will obviously need an exceptional and exceptionally large aristocracy.  Those opponents of Fabianism who desire something more revolutionary than its political ‘meliorism’ and ‘palliatives’ accuse it of alliance with bureaucracy.  They urge that it relies on bureaucracy to administer social reforms from above; and they conclude that, since any governing class is anti-democratic, the Fabians who believe in such a class are really anti-democratic.  The charge seems, as a matter of fact, difficult to sustain.  Fabians from the first felt and urged that the decentralisation of the State was a necessary condition of the realisation of their aim.  The municipality and other local units were the natural bodies for administering the new funds and discharging the new duties which the realisation of that aim would create.  ‘A democratic State,’ Shaw wrote, ’cannot become a Social Democratic State unless it has in every centre of population a local governing body as thoroughly democratic in its constitution as the central Parliament.’  The House of Commons he felt must develop ’into the central government which will be the organ of federating the municipalities.’  Fabianism thus implied no central bureaucracy; what it demanded was partly, indeed, a more efficient and expert central government (and there is plenty of room for that), but primarily an expert local civil service in close touch with and under the control of a really democratic municipal government.  It is difficult to say that this is bureaucracy or that it is not desirable.  Many men who are not Fabians or Socialists of any kind feel strongly that the breathing of more vigour and interest into local politics, and the creation of a proper local civil service, are the great problems of the future.

“The policy of Fabianism has thus been somewhat as follows.  An intellectual circle has sought to permeate all classes, from the top to the bottom, with a common opinion in favour of social control of socially created values.  Resolved to permeate all classes, it has not preached class-consciousness; it has worked as much with and through Liberal ‘capitalists’ as with and through Labour representatives.  Resolved gradually to permeate, it has not been revolutionary:  it has relied on the slow growth of opinion.  Reformist rather than revolutionary, it has explained the impossibility of the sudden ‘revolution’ of the working classes against capital:  it has urged the necessity of a gradual amelioration of social conditions by a gradual assertion of social control over unearned increment.[55] Hence Fabianism has not adopted the somewhat cold attitude of the pure Socialist Party to Trade Unions, but has rather found in their gradual conquest of better wages and better conditions for the workers the line of social advance congenial