stirred in me not so much a sense of pity or of distress as of an incipient feeling that “all was not right” in this best of all possible worlds. But I would not assign this feeling as a definite seed of economic thought. For it was far later that I came to concern myself with “problems of poverty.”
Perhaps a more suggestive feeling of this boyhood was addressed to the other end of the social economic scale as it was exhibited in my native town. I refer to the push and sagacity by which half a dozen men, who had attained considerable wealth in manufacture and commerce, used their generosity to local charities and their political pressure to obtain knighthoods, so rising out of the ruck of their social competitors into a level beyond mere “respectability.”
Politics in this placid epoch had little social or economic significance. Factory legislation and other interference with competitive capitalism did not figure with any prominence, and, though there was a good deal of loose philanthropic talk about “the amelioration of the condition of the working classes,” there was no sincere attempt at amelioration by governmental action. The dominant classes in Derby were pretty equally divided between Conservatism and Liberalism, the latter generally carrying the elections by their larger hold upon the working-class electors. When I first began ‘to take notice’ of such matters as elections, Gladstone and Disraeli were the great protagonists, while conflicts where the extension
