SOCIALISM

On leaving Oxford, while Wallas had become a schoolmaster, his friend Olivier had entered the Colonial Office in 1882. There he met Sidney Webb who was also a resident clerk living in Downing Street. Calling on Olivier, Wallas met Webb and they moved at once on to terms of intellectual intimacy. Webb had met Bernard Shaw a year or two previously at the debates of the Zetetical Society; Olivier met Shaw through the Land Reform Union, formed in 1883 to further Henry George's ideas. By the end of 1884, if not earlier, Olivier, Shaw, Wallas and Webb all knew each other and they seem to have formed a high opinion of each other from the outset. ‘The history of any definite “school” of philosophic or political opinion,’ wrote Wallas in Francis Place (1898), ‘will generally show that its foundation was made possible by personal friendship’ (p. 65).

At this time they were all groping around for a soundly formulated radical approach to social problems. Shaw had been greatly impressed first by Henry George and then by the writings of Marx, of whom he became an adherent, defending the value theory in controversy with Philip Wicksteed in the winter of 1884–5. For the others, however, though they were looking for some kind of change on the moral axis, it was by no means clear that socialism would meet their need better than a thoroughgoing commitment to moral regeneration.