had at first rather glibly
assumed, an "ideal," but a complete misrepresentation of the quality and
possibilities of things.

I do not know now whether it was during my school-days or at Cambridge
that I first began not merely to see the world as a great contrast of
rich and poor, but to feel the massive effect of that multitudinous
majority of people who toil continually, who are for ever anxious about
ways and means, who are restricted, ill clothed, ill fed and ill
housed, who have limited outlooks and continually suffer misadventures,
hardships and distresses through the want of money. My lot had fallen
upon the fringe of the possessing minority; if I did not know the want
of necessities I knew shabbiness, and the world that let me go on to a
university education intimated very plainly that there was not a thing
beyond the primary needs that my stimulated imagination might demand
that it would not be an effort for me to secure. A certain aggressive
radicalism against the ruling and propertied classes followed almost
naturally from my circumstances. It did not at first connect itself at
all with the perception of a planless disorder in human affairs that had
been forced upon me by the atmosphere of my upbringing, nor did it link
me in sympathy with any of the profounder realities of poverty. It was
a personal independent thing. The dingier people one saw in the back
streets and lower quarters of Bromstead and Penge, the drift of dirty
children, ragged old women, street loafers, grimy workers that made
the social background of London, the stories one heard of privation and
sweating, only joined up very slowly with the general propositions I was
making about life. We could become splendidly eloquent about the social
revolution and the triumph of the Proletariat after the Class war, and
it was only by a sort of inspiration that it came to me that my bedder,
a garrulous old thing with a dusty black bonnet over one eye and an
ostentatiously clean apron outside the dark mysteries that clothed her,
or the cheeky little ruffians who yelled papers about the streets, were
really material to such questions.

Directly any of us young socialists of Trinity found ourselves in
immediate contact with servants or cadgers or gyps or bedders or
plumbers or navvies or cabmen or railway porters we became unconsciously
and unthinkingly aristocrats. Our voices altered, our gestures altered.
We behaved just as all the other men, rich or poo