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
generation it came as the revolt of the workers. Rodbertus we never
heard of and the Fabian Society we did not understand; Marx and
Morris, the Chicago Anarchists, JUSTICE and Social Democratic
Federation (as it was then) presented socialism to our minds.
Hatherleigh was the leading exponent of the new doctrines in
Trinity, and the figure upon his wall of a huge-muscled, black-
haired toiler swaggering sledgehammer in hand across a revolutionary
barricade, seemed the quintessence of what he had to expound.
Landlord and capitalist had robbed and enslaved the workers, and
were driving them quite automatically to inevitable insurrection.
They would arise and the capitalist system would flee and vanish
like the mists before the morning, like the dews before the sunrise,
giving place in the most simple and obvious manner to an era of
Right and Justice and Virtue and Well Being, and in short a
Perfectly Splendid Time.

I had already discussed this sort of socialism under the guidance of
Britten, before I went up to Cambridge. It was all mixed up with
ideas about freedom and natural virtue and a great scorn for kings,