policy. This laisser-faire attitude of the Liberalism of the sixties and seventies was the accepted basis of my earliest political education. The gulf between politics and workaday life was fixed and complete.
But two other lines of personal experience bearing upon class distinctions had some influence in the early moulding of my social thinking. Derby was a religious community in which the Established Church and leading Nonconformist sects were strongly supported. Church and chapel going was universal and, for the young, compulsory: family prayers were pretty general, and piety played a considerable part in ordinary life. But though in creed there was little divergence, the social cleavage between Church people and Dissenters was clear and strong. A higher grade of respectability attached to the former, and there was a tendency for the younger generation of well-to-do Dissenters to join the Church when they reached “years of discretion.” Church and Dissent upon the whole meant rich and poor, though most dissenting chapels were necessarily financed by fairly well-to-do members. I noticed also a certain favourable social discrimination in favour of Quakers and Unitarians, based, I suppose, upon the fact that in those small sects a larger proportion of the followers were recognized as men and women of good social and financial standing.
Ritualism was slow to enter into our church services even in the late sixties. Though Derby had its Catholic
