Functional socialism

g2 FUNCTIONAL SOCIALISM

great business men seemed to me to be an illusion. ‘They weren’t good business men.” Recalling some of the greatest names in modern business, he went on:

Some of them merely lost all their money, some of them went to gaol. Most of the others were quite unaware how they had managed to make their money and how they contrived to keep it. For one like myself, with a passion for logic, the world of business was far too romantic, too wildly romantic and unreal. No wonder, then, I turned to music—an exact science with

severely logical laws.

When, thirty years ago, he went down from Oxford to his home in Lancashire, he not only had a taste for the arts but the conviction that life without the arts was mean and sterile. And that is how Lancashire then was:—

They tell me that the Northerner is hard. He may be so. But thirty years ago he was worse than that—he was brutally narrow. The typical Northerner never went to the theatre, never went to a concert hall except to hear an oratorio, knew nothing of pictures, and less of books. It was a world I could not live in, and it was a world of business.

That is what business brains had brought Lancashire to, not so very long ago. But Sir Thomas had something else to say:

Moreover, there was creeping into business at this time something which has now transformed it. Considered as a matter of business, everybody not an idler or