who might wish to claim the title of Sociologist. It was only at this period, when I was entering middle age, that I became largely engaged in active movements and “causes” along these three related lines. As lecturer for ethical societies, controversial anti-Imperialist and semi-Socialist in the Press, and sometimes on the platform, I gradually brought my ethical and political thoughts and sentiments into what I still hold to be their true organic relations with the business life and its economic science. “Economics” still remained the central occupation of my mind, but | was more and more drawn into the two positions which severed me from economic orthodoxy, first the insistence upon the growing part to be played by the State and political forces in the realities of economic life; secondly, the fundamental “immorality” of a business system in which all markets were morally damaged by differences in bargaining power and the settlement of market prices alike for goods and services by the play of selfish interests.
A more salutary experience of this period was the series of long visits to the United States and Canada, where I came into close contact with a play of economic forces simpler and more dramatic than those operative in England. A long journey through Canada in the autumn of 1905, recorded in a series of articles in the Daily Chronicle and afterwards in a small book Canada To-day,[1] gave me new light on the relations between
- ↑ London: T. Fisher Unwin.
