Page:Confessions of an Economic Heretic.djvu/121

 Looking back on the pre-War and the War period I recognize that my politics and economics have been influenced by several other weighty personal associations. One of these was John Morley, with whom I was on friendly terms for twenty years, and of whom I saw a good deal during the War period. In many vivid post-lunch conversations he disclosed not only his horror at recent happenings but the nature of Victorian radicalism with its pacific laisser-faire humanitarianism in home and foreign politics. “Yesterday,” he said to me in war-time, “I had a letter from an old friend in which he said, ‘Morley, you once spelt God with a small g. You were right.’” But most of his brilliant talk related to the political past, and helped me much to understand how definitely sundered were economics and politics to the mind of Victorian statesmen. John Bright, able business man, politician, religious moralist of the strictest pattern, was, nevertheless, able to feel it his duty to resist legal attempts to limit factory hours and to safeguard the health of the workers in his mills. Yet Morley once told me that he would rather have been Bright than any other mid-Victorian statesman. Here he probably had in mind, not so much Bright’s opinions as his wonderful power of oratory, a quality to which Morley could never aspire.

Another statesman with whom I had a long friendship and close contact during the War period was J. C. Smuts. Carrying personal introductions to him