Functional socialism

BRAINS gI

arrogant, since I, moi gui vous parle, am an intellectual! Nevertheless we may affirm with confidence that most intellectuals are misplaced in industry. Frequently they rise above it. Charles Lamb, we may remember, was a diligent clerk in the East India Office; the anthologist of the Golden Treasury was, perhaps appropriately, a clerk in the Bank of England; Edward Clodd, one of the great intellectuals of the last century, was the secretary of an insurance company; John Henry Shorthouse, who wrote ohn Inglesant (a book comparable to Marius the Epicurean), was a Quaker manufacturer in Birmingham—bedsteads, I think. Let us hope that his designs did not conduce to nightmare. Ricardo, the economist, was a stockbroker who made an immense fortune; Bastiat was a merchant; Proudhon a master printer; Carey a publisher; J. B. Say, the French economist, was first an insurance broker, and subsequently made a considerable fortune as a cotton spinner. And a cloud of others. These men certainly did not exhaust their mental powers in their trades. Probably they were glad to escape from commercial humdrum to give their intellectual hunger some satisfaction.

On the other hand what are we to say of so-called business brains? I happened recently to glance through a book written by a friend of mine in which there is an interview with Sir Thomas Beecham. Sir Thomas, under expert examination, admitted that he might have been a successful man of business. He was trained to it and rebelled. ‘‘For one thing, the