titles, wealth and officials, and it was symbolised by the red ties
we wore. Our simple verdict on existing arrangements was that they
were "all wrong." The rich were robbers and knew it, kings and
princes were usurpers and knew it, religious teachers were impostors
in league with power, the economic system was an elaborate plot on
the part of the few to expropriate the many. We went about feeling
scornful of all the current forms of life, forms that esteemed
themselves solid, that were, we knew, no more than shapes painted on
a curtain that was presently to be torn aside. . . .

It was Hatherleigh's poster and his capacity for overstating things,
I think, that first qualified my simple revolutionary enthusiasm.
Perhaps also I had met with Fabian publications, but if I did I
forget the circumstances. And no doubt my innate constructiveness
with its practical corollary of an analytical treatment of the
material supplied, was bound to push me on beyond this melodramatic
interpretation of human affairs.

I compared that Working Man of the poster with any sort of working
man I knew. I perceived that the latter was not going to change,
and indeed could not under any stimulus whatever be expected to
change, into the former. It crept into my mind as slowly and surely
as the dawn creeps into a room that the former was not, as I had at
first rather glibly assumed, an "ideal," but a complete
misrepresentation of the quality and possibilities of things.

I do not know now whether it was during my school-days or at
Cambridge that I first began not merely to see the world as a great
contrast of rich and poor, but to feel the massive effect of that
multitudinous majority of people who toil continually, who are for