and my attention was first drawn to political economy as the science of social salvation by Henry George’s eloquence, and by his Progress and Poverty, which had an enormous circulation in the early eighties, and beyond all question had more to do with the Socialist revival of that period in England than any other book.  Before the Fabian Society existed I pressed George’s propaganda of Land Nationalisation on a meeting of the Democratic Federation, but was told to read Karl Marx.  I was so complete a novice in economics at that time that when I wrote a letter to Justice pointing out a flaw in Marx’s reasoning, I regarded my letter merely as a joke, and fully expected that some more expert Socialist economist would refute me easily.  Even when the refutation did not arrive I remained so impressed with the literary power and overwhelming documentation of Marx’s indictment of nineteenth-century Commercialism and the capitalist system, that I defended him against all comers in and out of season until Philip Wicksteed, the well-known Dante commentator, then a popular Unitarian minister, brought me to a standstill by a criticism of Marx which I did not understand.  This was the first appearance in Socialist controversy of the value theory of Jevons, published in 1871.  Professor Edgeworth and Mr. Wicksteed, to whom Jevons appealed as a mathematician, were at that time trying to convince the academic world of the importance of Jevons’s theory; but I, not being a mathematician, was not easily accessible to their methods of demonstration.  I consented to reply to Mr. Wicksteed on the express condition that the editor of To-day, in which my reply appeared, should find space for a rejoinder by Mr. Wicksteed.  My reply, which was not bad for a fake, and contained the germ of the economic argument for equality of income which I put forward twenty-five years later, elicited only a brief rejoinder; but the upshot was that I put myself into Mr. Wicksteed’s hands and became a convinced Jevonian, fascinated by the subtlety of Jevons’s theory and the exquisiteness with which it adapted itself to all the cases which had driven previous economists, including Marx, to take refuge in clumsy distinctions between use value, exchange value, labour value, supply and demand value, and the rest of the muddlements of that time.

Accordingly, the abstract economics of the Fabian Essays are, as regards value, the economics of Jevons.  As regards rent they are the economics of Ricardo, which I, having thrown myself into the study of abstract economics, had learnt from Ricardo’s own works and from De Quincey’s Logic of Political Economy.  I maintained, as I still do, that the older economists, writing before Socialism had arisen as a possible alternative to Commercialism and a menace to its vested interests, were far more candid in their statements and thorough in their reasoning than their successors, and was fond of citing the references in De Quincey and Austin’s Lectures on Jurisprudence to the country gentleman system and the evils of capitalism, as instances of frankness upon which no modern professor dare venture.