INTRODUCTION TO THE 1914 EDITION
tutions and existing limitations and boundaries is always with me; it is my King Charles's head, and it forms the substance of the longest novel I have ever written[1]—that is, if ever the war will let me get it written—the novel I am still writing. I admit that after fourteen years this open conspiracy still does not very definitely realise itself, but in that matter I have a constitutional undying patience. That open conspiracy will come. It is my faith. It is my form of political thought.
Since "Anticipations" was written I have been through the Fabian Society, and it is amusing in this moment of retrospect to recall that plunge and that tumultuous emergence. In the days when I wrote "Anticipations" I knew scarcely more of the Fabian Society than I did of the Zetetic Society, but the publication of that book and its follower "Mankind in the Making," brought Mr. and Mrs. Sidney Webb into my world. They appeared riding very rapidly upon bicycles from the direction of London, offering certain criticisms of my general forecast and urging me to join and stimulate the Fabians. This extraordinary couple, so able and energetic, so devoted, so perplexingly limited, exercised me enormously. Their essential criticism of "Anticipations" was that I did not sufficiently recognise the need and probability of a specialised governing class, and they expounded to my instinctively shrinking intelligence that conception of a great bureaucracy which it has been their life-work to convey to the English intelli-
- ↑ This was The Research Magnificent. Joan and Peter had still to be written in 1914.
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