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 belief that it might be possible to square the plain teaching of Christ with the practical teaching and conduct of British Christianity in its mundane aspect. But though I felt a certain sympathy with all those movements, attended their gatherings, and became acquainted with some of their leaders, I joined none of them. For, with the exception of the Fabians, they appeared to me either too inflammatory or too sentimental. Even the Fabians did not, in my judgment, assail capitalism in its weakest points, and though the Fabian Essays were a notable contribution to the economic education of the open-minded few, they had not the spirit of a popular appeal. The time for an effective general challenge of Capitalism was not yet ripe. Revelations of poverty, together with the extension of trade unionism to the unskilled workers (dramatized in the Dock Strike of 1889), were the direct stimuli of the “social reforms” of the nineties, and brought into being the Labour Party, which was soon to assume the name, if not the substance, of Socialism. But though my opinions and my feelings were beginning to move in the direction of Socialism, I was not a Socialist, Marxian, Fabian, or Christian.

Long before my mind was free to work upon the fundamental issues of economic science, I was caught in the network of a narrower economic heresy which played a distinctive part in all my later thinking. It came from what may be called an accidental contact.