"We had to study where we could and how we could. I need not repeat
the story of the Hampstead Historic Club, founded by a handful of us
to read Marx and Proudhon, and afterwards turned into a systematic
history class in which each student took his turn at being professor.
My own experience may be taken as typical. For some years I attended
the Hampstead Historic Club once a fortnight, and spent a night in
the alternate weeks at a private circle of economists which has since
blossomed into the British Economic Association--a circle where the
social question was left out, and the work kept on abstract
scientific lines. I made all my acquaintances think me madder than
usual by the pertinacity with which I attended debating societies and
haunted all sorts of hole-and-corner debates and public meetings and
made speeches at them. I was President of the Local Government Board
at an amateur Parliament where a Fabian ministry had to put its
proposals into black and white in the shape of Parliamentary Bills.
Every Sunday I lectured on some subject which I wanted to teach to
myself; and it was not until I had come to the point of being able to
deliver separate lectures, without notes, on Rent, Interest, Profits,
Wages, Toryism, Liberalism, Socialism, Communism, Anarchism,
Trade-Unionism, Co-operation, Democracy, the Division of Society into
Classes, and the Suitability of Human Nature to Systems of Just
Distribution, that I was able to handle Social-Democracy as it must
be handled before it can be preached in such a way as to present it
to every sort of man from his own particular point of view.
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