r, swatters or
sportsmen or Pinky Dinkys, behaved, and exactly as we were expected
to behave. On the whole it is a population of poor quality round about
Cambridge, rather stunted and spiritless and very difficult to idealise.
That theoretical Working Man of ours!--if we felt the clash at all we
explained it, I suppose, by assuming that he came from another part of
the country; Esmeer, I remember, who lived somewhere in the Fens, was
very eloquent about the Cornish fishermen, and Hatherleigh, who was
a Hampshire man, assured us we ought to know the Scottish miner.
My private fancy was for the Lancashire operative because of his
co-operative societies, and because what Lancashire thinks to-day
England thinks to-morrow.... And also I had never been in Lancashire.

By little increments of realisation it was that the profounder verities
of the problem of socialism came to me. It helped me very much that I
had to go down to the Potteries several times to discuss my future with
my uncle and guardian; I walked about and saw Bursley Wakes and much of
the human aspects of organised industrialism at close quarters for the
first time. The picture of a splendid Working Man cheated out of his
innate glorious possibilities, and presently to arise and dash this
scoundrelly and scandalous system of private ownership to fragments,
began to give place to a limitless spectacle of inefficiency, to a
conception of millions of people not organised as they should be, not
educated as they should be, not simply prevented from but incapable
of nearly every sort of beauty, mostly kindly and well meaning, mostly
incompetent, mostly obstinate, and easily humbugged and easily diverted.
Even the tragic and inspiring idea of Marx, that the poor were nearing
a limit of painful experience, and awakening to a sense of intolerable
wrongs, began to develop into the more appalling conception that the
poor were simply in a witless uncomfortable inconclusive way--"muddling
along"; that they wanted nothing very definitely nor very urgently, that
mean fears enslaved them and mean satisfactions decoyed them, that they
took the very gift of life itself with a spiritless lassitude, hoarding
it, being rather anxious not to lose it than to use it in any way
whatever.

The complete development of that realisation was the work of many
years. I had only the first intimations at Cambridge. But I did have
intimations. Most acutely do I remember the doubts that followed