The Rev. Samuel (later Canon) Barnett in the same review a month earlier advocated Free Libraries and graduated taxation to pay for free education, under the title of “Practicable Socialism.”  In April, 1883, Emile de Lavelaye described with alarm the “Progress of Socialism.”  “On the Continent,” he wrote, “Socialism is said to be everywhere.”  To it he attributed with remarkable inaccuracy, the agrarian movement in Ireland, and with it he connected the fact that Henry George’s new book, “Progress and Poverty,” was selling by thousands “in an ultra popular form” in the back streets and alleys of England.  And then he goes on to allude to Prince Bismarck’s “abominable proposition to create a fund for pensioning invalid workmen by a monopoly of tobacco”!

Thirty years ago politics were only intermittently concerned with social problems.  On the whole the view prevailed, at any rate amongst the leaders, that Government should interfere in such matters as little as possible.  Pauperism was still to be stamped out by ruthless deterrence:  education had been only recently and reluctantly taken in hand:  factory inspection alone was an accepted State function.  Lord Beaconsfield was dead and he had forgotten his zeal for social justice long before he attained power.  Gladstone, then in the zenith of his fame, never took any real interest in social questions as we now understand them.  Lord Salisbury was an aristocrat and thought as an aristocrat.  John Bright viewed industrial life from the standpoint of a Lancashire mill-owner.  William Edward Forster, the creator of national education, a Chartist in his youth, had become the gaoler of Parnell and the protagonist of coercion in Ireland.  Joseph Chamberlain alone seemed to realise the significance of the social problem, and unhappily political events were soon to deflect his career from what then seemed to be its appointed course.

The political parties therefore offered very little attraction to the young men of the early eighties, who, viewing our social system with the fresh eyes of youth, saw its cruelties and its absurdities and judged them, not as older men, by comparison with the worse cruelties and greater absurdities of earlier days, but by the standard of common fairness and common sense, as set out in the lessons they had learned in their schools, their universities, and their churches.

It is nowadays not easy to recollect how wide was the intellectual gulf which separated the young generation of that period from their parents.  “The Origin of Species,” published in 1859, inaugurated an intellectual revolution such as the world had not known since Luther nailed his Theses to the door of All Saints’ Church at Wittenberg.  The older folk as a rule refused to accept or to consider the new doctrine.  I recollect a botanical Fellow of the Royal Society who, in 1875, told me that he had no opinions on Darwin’s hypothesis.  The young men of the time I am describing grew up