Except in these
instances we heard nothing of Mill in the Fabian Society. Cairnes's
denunciation of the idle consumers of rent and interest was frequently
quoted; and Marshall's Economics of Industry was put into our book boxes
as a textbook; but the taste for abstract economics was no more general
in the Fabian Society than elsewhere. I had in my boyhood read some of
Mill's detached essays, including those on constitutional government
and on the Irish land question, as well as the inevitable one on
Liberty; but none of these pointed to Socialism; and my attention was
first drawn to political economy as the science of social salvation by
Henry George's eloquence, and by his Progress and Poverty, which had an
enormous circulation in the early eighties, and beyond all question had
more to do with the Socialist revival of that period in England than any
other book. Before the Fabian Society existed I pressed George's
propaganda of Land Nationalisation on a meeting of the Democratic
Federation, but was told to read Karl Marx. I was so complete a novice
in economics at that time that when I wrote a letter to Justice pointing
out a flaw in Marx's reasoning, I regarded my letter merely as a joke,
and fully expected that some more expert Socialist economist would
refute me easily. Even when the refutation did not arrive I remained so
impressed with the literary power and overwhelming documentation of
Marx's indictment of nineteenth-century Commercialism and the capitalist
system, that I defended him against all comers in and out of season
until Philip Wicksteed, the well-known Dante commentator, then a popular
Unitarian minister, brought me to a standstill by a criticism of Marx
which I did not understand.
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