Page:Confessions of an Economic Heretic.djvu/36

 could there be any limit to the amount of useful saving when every item of saving went to increase the capital structure and the fund for paying wages? Sound economists could not fail to view with horror an argument which sought to check the source of all industrial progress. Another interesting personal experience helped to bring home to me the sense of my iniquity. Though prevented from lecturing on economics in London, I had been allowed by the greater liberality of the Oxford University Extension Movement to address audiences in the provinces, confining myself to practical issues relating to working-class life. Now it happened at this time that the Charity Organisation Society was planning a lecture campaign upon economic. subjects and invited me to prepare a course. For I had already been associated with the London Ethical Society, several active members of which were also workers for the C.O.S. I had expressed my willingness to undertake this new lecture work, when suddenly, without explanation, the invitation was withdrawn. Even then I hardly realized that in appearing to question the virtue of unlimited thrift I had committed the unpardonable sin.

I may here interpose the statement that my heresy was far from being as original a sin as I had supposed. For, as Mr. J. M. Robertson has shown in his book The Fallacy of Saving, the heresy had a fairly long record in the annals of English economic thinking, including in its adherents such reputable names as Shaftesbury,