Page:Confessions of an Economic Heretic.djvu/35

 While teaching at a school in Exeter I came into personal relations with a business man named Mummery, known then and afterwards as a great mountaineer who had discovered another way up the Matterhorn and who in 1895 was killed in an attempt to climb the famous Himalayan mountain Nanga Parbat. My intercourse with him, I need hardly say, did not lie on this physical plane. But he was a mental climber as well, with a natural zest for a path of his own finding and a sublime disregard of intellectual authority. This man entangled me in a controversy about excessive saving, which he regarded as responsible for the underemployment of capital and labour in periods of bad trade. For a long time I sought to counter his arguments by the use of the orthodox economic weapons. But at length he convinced me and I went in with him to elaborate the over-saving argument in a book entitled The Physiology of Industry, which was published in 1889. This was the first open step in my heretical career, and I did not in the least realize its momentous consequences. For just at that time I had given up my scholastic post and was opening a new line of work as University Extension Lecturer in Economics and Literature. The first shock came in a refusal of the London Extension Board to allow me to offer courses of political economy. This was due, I learned, to the intervention of an economic Professor who had read my book and considered it as equivalent in rationality to an attempt to prove the flatness of the earth. How