Page:Confessions of an Economic Heretic.djvu/20

, the elementary facts and feelings related to our family and other social surroundings are drawn almost insensibly into our childish minds from our immediate environment, with such parental suggestions as may be brought into play. The total influence of these early happenings and feelings is now recognized as extremely important in determining the later conscious thinking upon all personal and social problems. Where some great social event, such as a war, pestilence, or famine, breaks in upon the experience of childhood, it leaves a crop of passions, fears, and tumultuous feelings which gravely affect all processes of thinking in matters affecting personal and social conduct. This platitude I repeat because it has a definite bearing on my early years which were cast in the calmest and most self-confident years of the mid-Victorian era, when peace, prosperity, and progress appeared to be the permanent possession of most civilized nations. Born and bred in the middle stratum of the middle class of a middle-sized industrial town of the Midlands, I was favourably situated for a complacent acceptance of the existing social order. There was not stagnation anywhere, but a gradual orderly improvement in the standard of living, the working conditions, and the behaviour of most classes. The social stratification was taken for granted, there was no serious attempt of the working classes to push their economic or social claims upon the upper classes. Energetic or able individuals could use their opportunities to rise, and a