Page:The Case for Capitalism (1920).djvu/37

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those who started with it against them it must have often been a daunting influence if it affected them seriously. But how far did it do so? The average man surely aims at being moderately successful in the conditions under which he starts. One can, in these matters, only judge from one's own experience. To myself, born into the circumstances of an ordinary middle-class family, it never occurred that I was handicapped by the fact that many people were born with much easier chances of much greater success. There was a road clearly marked out for me. Somehow I had to make a living, and the fact that some people were not under that necessity was not a thing that influenced me one way or the other in approaching the problem. But this may only have been because I was thoughtless or unimaginative, and I remember when I was at Oxford hearing a very brilliant man of my year remark that it made him "feel Socialistic" when he was starting off to an early morning lecture and saw other men setting out for a day's hunting. In this case at any rate the early recognition of what seemed to be economic injustice had no practical effect in checking effort. My old friend may have felt Socialistic, but he went off to his lecture and did his day's