propriated--as if Marx had arranged the picture. It was as jumbled and
far more dingy and disastrous than any of the confusions of building and
development that had surrounded my youth at Bromstead and Penge, but
it had a novel quality of being explicable. I found great virtue in the
word "exploitation."

There stuck in my mind as if it was symbolical of the whole thing the
twisted figure of a man, whose face had been horribly scalded--I can't
describe how, except that one eye was just expressionless white--and
he ground at an organ bearing a card which told in weak and bitterly
satirical phrasing that he had been scalded by the hot water from
the tuyeres of the blast furnace of Lord Pandram's works. He had been
scalded and quite inadequately compensated and dismissed. And Lord
Pandram was worth half a million.

That upturned sightless white eye of his took possession of my
imagination. I don't think that even then I was swayed by any crude
melodramatic conception of injustice. I was quite prepared to believe
the card wasn't a punctiliously accurate statement of fact, and that
a case could be made out for Lord Pandram. Still there in the muddy
gutter, painfully and dreadfully, was the man, and he was smashed and
scalded and wretched, and he ground his dismal hurdygurdy with a weary
arm, calling upon Heaven and the passer-by for help, for help and some
sort of righting--one could not imagine quite what. There he was as a
fact, as a by-product of the system that heaped my cousins with trinkets
and provided the comic novels and the abundant cigars and spacious
billiard-room of my uncle's house. I couldn't disconnect him and them.

My uncle on his part did nothing to conceal the state of war that
existed between himself and his workers, and the mingled contempt and
animosity he felt from them.

3

Prosperity had overtaken my uncle. So quite naturally he believed that
every man who was not as prosperous as he was had only himself to blame.
He was rich and he had left school and gone into his father's business
at fifteen, and that seemed to him the proper age at which everyone's
education should terminate. He was very anxious to dissuade me from
going up to Cambridge, and we argued intermittently through all my
visit.

I had remembered him as a big and buoyant man, striding destructively
about the nursery floor of my childhood, and saluting my existence by
slaps, loud laughter, and questions about half herrings a