A friend who saw Fawcett lecturing at Cambridge after the repeal of compulsory attendance says that the impression made upon him was grotesque. On entering the lecture-room, which was practically deserted, one saw the huge blind man holding forth with his ringing voice to space. Fawcett, in answer to condolences on this weird phenomenon, replied, with a merry laugh, that it was quite all right and he was used to it. Fawcett was practically the only professor who objected to the withdrawal of compulsion; he said that he had been convinced by experience that his hearers profited more than he had anticipated. Examinations showed that they had really acquired useful knowledge. He did not share the objections of his colleagues, who felt that they had to lecture above the capacities of their enforced audiences. He should not, he said, alter in any case the character of his own lectures. There is something sublime and adamantine in this attitude; with his two feet planted firmly, the blind man proposed not for a moment to lessen the height of his intellectual stature, but by sheer force and determination, derrick-like, to hoist even the lowest members of his audience up to his own level. The impracticability of this point of view is obvious, but it is intensely Fawcettian. He felt that the great truths embodied in political economy were so simple and vital that he could graft them painlessly and with good results on the most unfertile mind. [Sidenote: The Science of Helpfulness.] He did not confine himself to elucidating the essential elements of his science only, nor was he content to reiterate what he had said to former audiences. He loved political economy as a living and helpful science. His lectures were always fresh, earnest, and illustrated by the bearing of the subject on history or current political events. He did not care to teach subtleties, but to drill his pupils in a science which he firmly believed would help them to deal intelligently and efficiently with the great problems of inequality, poverty, ignorance, and misery which were calling in vain to high Heaven to be solved. Fawcett’s critics among the younger men often felt that he was too conservative. He idealised Mill, and his friends maintained that he had read no book except Mill’s _Political Economy_; it was true that he had read no book so exhaustively. He urged his hearers at one of his lectures to study some good book until they were prepared to give the substance and fully to analyse the argument of every chapter, and then having acted conscientiously on his advice himself, naïvely suggested Mill’s _Political Economy_ as excellent for this purpose. [Sidenote: Homely Political Economy.]