Page:Confessions of an Economic Heretic.djvu/75

 he was appointed! When I met him later in England, after years of further campaigning all over the States, I found the same simple, honest, fervent nature, decorated with the same power of empty oratory.

If, as is likely, these vivid experiences tended to over-stress my sense of the dangers of a dominant capitalism, this bias was to some extent offset by other travels into more peaceful countries. In 1902 I spent a pleasant, profitable fortnight in Denmark with Seebohm Rowntree, who was making a study of the “milk” problem, and there learned a good deal about the education and politics of what is perhaps the most genuinely civilized country in the world. Four years later I spent several weeks in Switzerland, investigating the operations of the Referendum and the general working of Swiss democracy, in order to complete the work to which my friend H. D. Lloyd had given so much attention shortly before his death. The distinctive thought that emerged from these visits was the advantage which a small nation, living upon an equalitarian level in its business and social relations, enjoyed in the working of democracy.

These travels, bringing me into close contact with practical affairs in various countries, strengthened my distinctive attitude in social thinking, viz. the testing of all political and economic conduct by the criteria of human welfare, however difficult and imperfect that process may be regarded from any standpoint of scientific exactitude.