Page:Confessions of an Economic Heretic.djvu/30

 principles and laws in the spirit of a true believer, I discovered later on that a seed of doubt had been sown in my mind which was destined to bear perilous fruit. For Mill’s dogma that “A demand for commodities is not a demand for labour,” plausibly supported by the teaching that all wages were paid from a “fund” that represented a portion of past savings, seems even at that early time to have stuck in my gizzard.

It was, however, not until the middle eighties that my economic heterodoxy began to take shape. At Oxford in the late seventies I made no serious attempt at economic study, for Modern Greats did not then exist, and Classical Greats had no room for it. Some part I took in College debates upon Fair Trade which was the first phase in the later campaign of Protectionism, and though attending with regularity the Union debates, where economics occasionally butted into politics, I heard nothing to disturb my complacent acceptance of the beneficent and equitable operation