plumbers or navvies or cabmen or railway porters we became
unconsciously and unthinkingly aristocrats. Our voices altered, our
gestures altered. We behaved just as all the other men, rich or
poor, swatters or sportsmen or Pinky Dinkys, behaved, and exactly as
we were expected to behave. On the whole it is a population of poor
quality round about Cambridge, rather stunted and spiritless and
very difficult to idealise. That theoretical Working Man of ours!--
if we felt the clash at all we explained it, I suppose, by assuming
that he came from another part of the country; Esmeer, I remember,
who lived somewhere in the Fens, was very eloquent about the Cornish
fishermen, and Hatherleigh, who was a Hampshire man, assured us we
ought to know the Scottish miner. My private fancy was for the
Lancashire operative because of his co-operative societies, and
because what Lancashire thinks to-day England thinks to-morrow. . . .
And also I had never been in Lancashire.

By little increments of realisation it was that the profounder
verities of the problem of socialism came to me. It helped me very
much that I had to go down to the Potteries several times to discuss
my future with my uncle and guardian; I walked about and saw Bursley
Wakes and much of the human aspects of organised industrialism at
close quarters for the first time. The picture of a splendid
Working Man cheated out of his innate glorious possibilities, and
presently to arise and dash this scoundrelly and scandalous system
of private ownership to fragments, began to give place to a
limitless spectacle of inefficiency, to a conception of millions of
people not organised as they should be, not educated as they should
be, not simply prevented from but incapable of nearly every sort of
beauty, mostly kindly and well meaning, mostly incompetent, mostly
obstinate, and easily humbugged and easily diverted. Even the