Page:Confessions of an Economic Heretic.djvu/28

 into the sixth form, as serviceable for winning a University scholarship, arid an Oxford Don, chosen for the purpose, set me upon Mill’s Liberty and Utilitarianism, which caught my sympathy as a budding rationalist. How Spencer’s Study of Sociology came into my hands I cannot recollect, though it exercised a profound influence in suggesting that social institutions could rightly come within the ambit of interesting study. Possibly the knowledge that Spencer was himself born and reared in Derby stimulated my curiosity. For, as a boy in my early teens, I used to meet Spencer walking into town with a man named Lott, a bank manager and a close friend of his. But while I had some slight acquaintance with Lott, I never exchanged a word with Spencer, though some quarter of a century later we interchanged letters upon the subject of the Boer War.

My first definite approach to Economics was by way of the Cambridge University Extension Movement of the seventies. One of the earliest of these Courses was in Derby, and in 1875 I attended lectures on political economy, wrote weekly papers, and took the examination. Our text-books were Mill and Mrs. Fawcett, with, I think, a few chapters of Adam Smith. J. S. Mill was the “authority,” for his statement in 1848 that, “Happily there is nothing in the laws of Value, which remains for the present or any future writer to clear up,” still held the academic field, though W. S. Jevons’s Theory of Political Economy had