Excerpt from The Road Ahead by John T. Flynn
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Road_Ahead;_America's_Creeping_Revolution

The Fabian Dream

For a thousand years, says Winston Churchill in his war memoirs, no
alien enemy has been able to invade the shores of England. It is quite
true that the doughty Briton has been able to keep Hitler, as he kept
Napoleon, from crossing his guarded channel. But for all that, Karl
Marx made it. And now we shall see how it was done. Of course the
British apologist for the present government in London will tell you
his socialism has nothing to do with Marx. We shall deal with that
later. For the moment, let us rest with the observation that no
American can understand what is happening in America if he does not
understand what has happened in England and how it was brought about.

In 1883 a small group of Socialists organized what they called the
Fabian Society. In time it included such eminent persons as Sidney and
Beatrice Webb, Annie Besant, George Bernard Shaw, Ramsay MacDonald and
others. These Englishmen believed that if socialism was to be brought
to England it would have to be done gradually and not by violent
revolutionary means. They decided they would make the attempt through
political methods. They adopted the policy of the Roman general,
Quintus Fabius, who held the only way to defeat Hannibal was to avoid
a general engagement and by clever withdrawals lure him to battle in
small sectors and defeat him in sections. Hence they called the
movement the Fabian movement. Their strategy as well as their program
became known as Fabian Socialism. Sidney Webb, their great statesman,
later known as Lord Passfield, saw clearly that if socialism was to
make any headway against the solid rock of British opinion it would
have to  do so by constitutional processes. The cause must move one
step at a time, he insisted, taking care never to offend the moral
sense of the masses who must be offered only so much at each stage as
they would accept. This Fabian Society never had more than 4000
members. Yet it was this small group that made the whole amazing
triumph of socialism possible in England. This triumph was not gained
through sheer luck or accident.

The Fabians early outlined a definite plan. They did not, of course,
invent it out-of-hand in a session or two around a conference table.
It grew in their minds a little at a time. It was probably not until
around the turn of the century that they saw it clearly in all its
parts. This plan may be briefly summarized as follows:

1. The first feature was the Fabian Society itself, which became the
political planning machine that made the plans, was the training
school for Socialist leaders, schooled speakers and writers and
leaders, directed the national educational program and acted as the
general staff of the movement.
2. The Fabians began by advocating not a Socialist State but a Welfare
State as the prologue.
3. They resolved to offer their program in small successive sections—
by means of gradualism, as it came to be known.
4. They decided against total State ownership of land and industry.
They proposed State ownership of the great basic functions—credit,
electric power, transportation, basic metals.
The balance of the economic system would be left in private hands but
operated under plans made by the State.
5. They held they must capture the mind of the working class and to
that end must take over the apparatus—that is, the officialdom—of the
labor unions.
6. They decided to form a political arm—a party—which later became the
British Labor Party.
7. They decided to begin by cooperating with the Liberal Party, which
corresponded to our Democratic Party, until their own Labor Party
acquired strength enough to displace it.
8. They agreed they must penetrate and capture the instruments of
public opinion and information—the writers, the churchmen and the
schools.

This plan had one thing to be said for it. It succeeded. Its central
aim was to bring on socialism without mentioning that odious word—to
offer to the voters one small part of the Socialist
machine at a time without the Socialist label on it; to smuggle
socialism into the social fabric without arousing the suspicions of
the masses. Whatever may be said for it, it was
a sneak attack. Now let us see, briefly, how it worked.
Actually the movement did not get well under way until about 1905.
Behold at that moment the majestic edifice of Great Britain—from her
sea-girt citadel extending her sway over a vast
empire spreading over all the continents, her navy patrolling the
seven seas of which she was the mistress, her factories sending out
mountains of products to every land from which in
turn flowed golden streams of raw materials and money, her pound
sterling the very symbol of financial stability, her might invincible,
her very name a synonym for wealth and power.

Edward VII sat upon his solid throne and England's ancient aristocracy
ranged around it in grandeur and security at the heart of what was
supposed to be the best of all possible worlds. It was into this
immense and virile organism that this small coterie of Socialist
doctrinaires thrust themselves. They got in motion around 1905, the
year the Liberal Party came to power under Campbell-Bannerman, Herbert
Asquith and Lloyd George. Nine years later the Labor Party had
representatives in the British cabinet. Four years after that their
party was the official opposition, having pushed the old Liberal Party
aside. In ñve more years their leader, Ramsay MacDonald, was Prime
Minister of England.

In this year 1949 a Socialist government rules supreme in England and
England has become one of the Socialist nations. And of the 390
Socialist members in Parliament, 230 are members of the Fabian Society
and 41 of its members are in the government/You may not approve of
these gentlemen, but you cannot scoff at them.

Now let us look at the manner in which each of these several steps was
accomplished. Of course the existence of the Fabian Society was the
first step, providing the movement with its general staff made up of
men of great intelligence and with a deeply rooted and flaming zeal
for their cause. The first direct move had come in a small way in
1893, when Keir Hardie, a member of the Fabians, formed the
Independent Labor Party, although it comprised only a handful of labor
delegates. This was the first move in the plan to capture the
apparatus of the labor unions. The prime movers in this party were all
Socialists. But they rejected the idea of calling this a Socialist
Party. They decided it would be easier to draw in the members of the
labor unions if the word socialism were kept out and the organization
called a Labor Party. The Independent Labor Party was ultimately
abandoned and the final struggle carried on by its successor, the
British Labor Party.

The first line of policy pursued was to push England in the direction
of the Welfare State. As G. D. H. Cole says, while the new Party from
the outset was "Socialist in its aims," it put its chief emphasis upon
welfare and reform measures. These were the eight-hour day, abolition
of overtime and piece work, public provision out of taxes for the
sick, aged, widows and •orphans, free nonsectarian education up to the
universities, properly remunerated work for the unemployed. These
measures they believed would bring the labor unions to their side.
They felt that if they could capture the leaders and the official
machinery of the unions, the membership would fall in behind them.
These welfare measures made a powerful appeal to the
trade unionists. "They hoped that if they could get the trade unions
to collaborate with them . . . the rest of what they wanted would
speedily follow," says Cole, and, as he put it, 1 "British Working
Class Politics, 1832-1914" by G. D. H. Cole, Routledge, London, 1941,
"the Socialist tail would be strong enough to n:oag the TradeUnion
dog".

Events played into their hands. The British labor unions were looked
upon in their early days as purely instruments for collective
bargaining between employer and employee. They were not interested in
altering the structure of British society and they kept scrupulously
away from "the contamination of politics." The Fabians were determined
to drag them into politics. And they very quickly found issues which
aided in this plan. One was the famous Taff-Vale decision which said
that a union could be held in damages caused by a strike. The Fabians
convinced the labor leaders that this could be corrected only by a
Parliament favorable to labor and that this called for political
action. The unions were thus galvanized into political life and
the process was not to end until they had been brought completely
under the direction of Socialist leaders.
The first great battle was fought in 1905. The Liberal Party was
returned to power in Parliament. In that election, Labor won 29 seats.
But something equally as important happened.

Labor made a deal with the Liberals, who agreed to support Labor
proposals, in return for which Labor agreed to support Liberal Party
measures, chiefly free trade. In constituencies where Labor was
strongest, the Liberals supported Labor candidates. Where Liberals
were strongest, Labor supported the Liberal candidates. Labor Party
historians admit that many of the Labor candidates were elected as a
result of these deals, including Ramsay MacDonald and Philip Snowden.
But the chief significance of this was that while Labor had 29 of its
own members in Parliament, there were twice as many Liberal members
who owed their election to Labor Party support.

As time passed this condition spread. Labor elected more and more
Labor members and controlled more and more Liberal members, until the
Liberal Party found itself the prisoner of the Socialist Labor groups.
After 1906, when Asquith, the Liberal leader, became Prime Minister
and Lloyd George his Chancellor of the Exchequer,  Lloyd George leaped
into sudden and lurid notoriety with a succession of social welfare
measures. They were much the same as the New Deal proposed here from
1933 to 1937. Lloyd George looked upon all these as purely social
arrangements to aid the underprivileged people of England. But the
Labor Party knew this was just the prelude to more vigorous action.
These measures included the eight-hour day, workmen's compensation,
old-age pensions, housing legislation, public payment of election
expenses and, of course, invalidation of the TafTVale decision.

To Liberals and to humanitarian England all this was defensible social
reform wholly consistent with Liberal principles and in no way an
attack upon the British system of private ownership. But the Socialist
Fabian Planners saw it in a wholly different light. And it is at this
point we must be quite certain to see with clarity the pitfalls which
opened before England and which now yawn before us.