Page:Confessions of an Economic Heretic.djvu/85

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a practical knowledge of political thinking only attainable by one who has achieved his psychology by a long experience of administrative work. He and Hobhouse rank together in my experience as practical reformers, profoundly interested in the great happenings of their times, but always bringing their judgment on these happenings to a rational criterion of human value. Wallas broke away from the Fabian Society because it failed to denounce the Boer War and because of its early leaning toward Protection. Both he and Hobhouse remained pronounced Free-traders, and Hobhouse, when he left Manchester for London, acted for some time as secretary of the Free Trade Union. Both of them became teachers of politics and sociology in the newly formed London School of Economics, and were chief instruments in keeping alive the broad humanism of social teaching when there was a danger of over-cautious specialization in an institution whose earliest finance was derived from a convert to Socialism in the florid days of the Fabian Society when preaching meant business. If my fellow-townsman, Jonathan Hutchinson, had foreseen that his money would go into paying Professor Foxwell for teaching why not to socialize banking, Mr. Ackworth why not to nationalize the railways, I think he would have “turned in his grave.” But Hobhouse and Wallas, though little concerned with practical socialism, remained firm exponents of human values in social movements and institutions, and stood for justice, equality, and humanity in all vital