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NOTES ON MERCANTILISM, ETC. 365

against the ranks of orthodoxy. Though it is so com-pletely forgotten to-day, the publication of this bookmarks, in a sense, an epoch in economic thought . 1

The Physiology of Industry was written in collabora-tion with A. F. Mummery. Mr. Hobson has told howthe book came to be written as follows : 2

It was not until the middle ’eighties that my economicheterodoxy began to take shape. Though the Henry George campaign against land values and the early agitation of varioussocialist groups against the visible oppression of the workingclasses, coupled with the revelations of the two Boothsregarding the poverty of London, made a deep impression onmy feelings, they did not destroy my faith in Political Economy. That came from what may be called an accidental contact.While teaching at a school in Exeter I came into personalrelations with a business man named Mummery, known thenand afterwards as a great mountaineer who had discoveredanother way up the Matterhorn and who, in 1895, was killedin an attempt to climb the famous Himalayan mountainNanga Parbat. My intercourse with him, I need hardlysay, did not lie on this physical plane. But he was a mentalclimber as well, with a natural eye for a path of his own findingand a sublime disregard of intellectual authority. This manentangled me in a controversy about excessive saving, whichhe regarded as responsible for the under-employment ofcapital and labour in periods of bad trade. For a long timeI sought to counter his arguments by the use of the orthodoxeconomic weapons. But at length he convinced me and I wentin with him to elaborate the over-saving argument in a bookentitled The Physiology of Industry, which was published in1889. This was the first open step in my heretical career,and I did not in the least realise its momentous consequences.For just at that time I had given up my scholastic post andwas opening a new line of work as University ExtensionLecturer in Economics and Literature. The first shock camein a refusal of the London Extension Board to allow me to

1 J. M. Robertson ’s The Fallacy of Saving, published in 1892, supportedthe heresy of Mummery and Hobson. But it is not a book of much valueor significance, being entirely lacking in the penetrating intuitions of ThePhysiology of Industry.

2 In an address called “Confessions of an Economic Heretic”, deliveredbefore the London Ethical Society at Conway Hall on Sunday, July 14,1935. I reproduce it here by Mr. Hobson’s permission.