thought and leadership to movements “for the amelioration of the condition of the working classes.” The men I have named, with a few others, had been associated with the Charity Organisation Society, a creation of the late seventies, which vested its reforms in the improvement of the character of the workers. But it became evident that any wider reforms of working-class character demanded a prior process of moral instruction for the upper and middle classes who had hitherto taken their social creed and charitable policy from the Orthodox Churches. Our ethical leaders rightly emphasized the need of a reasonable social and personal ethics, based not on any theology but upon a rational conception of moral welfare and applied to working out the conditions of “the good life.” My experience of this Ethical Society led me to regard it as excellent in its assertion of free discussion, but as committed so strongly to the stress on individual moral character, as the basis of social progress, as to make it the enemy of that political-economic democracy which I was coming to regard as the chief instrument of social progress and justice. This moral individualism was not, however, equally developed in the other ethical societies which were coming into existence at the close of the century. Nor was it applicable to the earliest Ethical Society, that of South Place, which from the time of Charles James Fox, the Corn Law reformer, had been a centre of free-thought and free speech on all the
