re populous and
various than the world of schoolmasters. The Shoesmiths and Naylors who
had been the aristocracy of City Merchants' fell into their place in my
mind; they became an undistinguished mass on the more athletic side of
Pinky Dinkyism, and their hostility to ideas and to the expression
of ideas ceased to limit and trouble me. The brighter men of each
generation stay up; these others go down to propagate their tradition,
as the fathers of families, as mediocre professional men, as assistant
masters in schools. Cambridge which perfects them is by the nature
of things least oppressed by them,--except when it comes to a vote in
Convocation.

We were still in those days under the shadow of the great Victorians. I
never saw Gladstone (as I never set eyes on the old Queen), but he
had resigned office only a year before I went up to Trinity, and the
Combination Rooms were full of personal gossip about him and Disraeli
and the other big figures of the gladiatorial stage of Parlimentary
history, talk that leaked copiously into such sets as mine. The ceiling
of our guest chamber at Trinity was glorious with the arms of Sir
William Harcourt, whose Death Duties had seemed at first like a
socialist dawn. Mr. Evesham we asked to come to the Union every year,
Masters, Chamberlain and the old Duke of Devonshire; they did not come
indeed, but their polite refusals brought us all, as it were, within
personal touch of them. One heard of cabinet councils and meetings at
country houses. Some of us, pursuing such interests, went so far as to
read political memoirs and the novels of Disraeli and Mrs. Humphry Ward.
From gossip, example and the illustrated newspapers one learnt something
of the way in which parties were split, coalitions formed, how permanent
officials worked and controlled their ministers, how measures were
brought forward and projects modified.

And while I was getting the great leading figures on the political
stage, who had been presented to me in my schooldays not so much as men
as the pantomimic monsters of political caricature, while I was getting
them reduced in my imagination to the stature of humanity, and their
motives to the quality of impulses like my own, I was also acquiring in
my Tripos work a constantly developing and enriching conception of
the world of men as a complex of economic, intellectual and moral
processes....

5

Socialism is an intellectual Proteus, but to the men of my generati