In July another important tract was approved for publication. "Facts for Londoners," No. 8 in the series, 55 pages of packed statistics sold for 6d., was the largest publication the Society had yet attempted. It is, as its sub-title states: "an exhaustive collection of statistical and other facts relating to the Metropolis, with suggestions for reform on Socialist principles." The latter were in no sense concealed: the Society still waved the red flag in season and out. "The Socialist Programme of immediately practicable reforms for London cannot be wholly dissociated from the corresponding Programme for the kingdom." This is the opening sentence, and it is followed by a page of explanation of the oppression of the workers by the private appropriation of rent and interest, and an outline of the proposed reforms, graduated and differentiated income tax, increased death duties, extension of the Factory Acts, reform of the Poor Law, payment of all public representatives, adult suffrage, and several others.
Then the tract settles down to business. London with its County Council only a few months old was at length waking to self-consciousness: Mr. Charles Booth's "Life and Labour in East London"--subsequently issued as the first part of his monumental work--had just been published; it was the subject of a Fabian lecture by Sidney Webb on May 17th; and interest in the political, economic, and social institutions of the city was general. The statistical facts were at that time practically unknown. They had to be dug out, one by one, from obscure and often unpublished sources, and the work thus done by the Fabian Society led up in later years to the admirable and far more voluminous statistical publications of the London County Council.
The tract deals with area and population; with rating, land values, and housing, with water, trams, and docks, all at that time in the hands of private companies, with gas, markets, City Companies, libraries, public-houses, cemeteries; and with the local government of London, Poor Law Guardians and the poor, the School Board and the schools, the Vestries, District Boards, the County Council, and the City Corporation. It was the raw material of Municipal Socialism, and from this time forth the Society recognised that the municipalisation of monopolies was a genuine part of the Socialist programme, that the transfer from private exploiters to public management at the start, and ultimately by the amortisation of the loans to public ownership, actually was _pro tanto_ the transfer from private to public ownership of land and capital, as demanded by Socialists.