s appealed as a mathematician,
were at that time trying to convince the academic world of the
importance of Jevons's theory; but I, not being a mathematician, was not
easily accessible to their methods of demonstration. I consented to
reply to Mr. Wicksteed on the express condition that the editor of
To-day, in which my reply appeared, should find space for a rejoinder
by Mr. Wicksteed. My reply, which was not bad for a fake, and contained
the germ of the economic argument for equality of income which I put
forward twenty-five years later, elicited only a brief rejoinder; but
the upshot was that I put myself into Mr. Wicksteed's hands and became a
convinced Jevonian, fascinated by the subtlety of Jevons's theory and
the exquisiteness with which it adapted itself to all the cases which
had driven previous economists, including Marx, to take refuge in clumsy
distinctions between use value, exchange value, labour value, supply and
demand value, and the rest of the muddlements of that time.

Accordingly, the abstract economics of the Fabian Essays are, as regards
value, the economics of Jevons. As regards rent they are the economics
of Ricardo, which I, having thrown myself into the study of abstract
economics, had learnt from Ricardo's own works and from De Quincey's
Logic of Political Economy. I maintained, as I still do, that the older
economists, writing before Socialism had arisen as a possible
alternative to Commercialism and a menace to its vested interests, were
far more candid in their statements and thorough in their reasoning than
their successors, and was fond of citing the references in De Quincey
and Austin's Lectures on Jurisprudence to the country gentleman system
and the evils of capitalism, as instances of frankness upon which no
modern professor dare venture.

The economical and moral identity of capital and interest with land and
rent was popularly demonstrated by Olivier in Tract 7 on Capital and
Land, and put into strict academic form by Sidney Webb. The point was of
importance at a time when the distinction was still so strongly
maintained that the Fabian Society was compelled to exclude Land
Nationalizers, both before and after their development into Single
Taxers, because they held that though land and rent should be
socialized, capital and interest must remain private property.

This really exhausts the history of the Fabian Society as far as
abstract economic theory is concerned. Activity in tha