He was impressed by the fact that the evil of the day was the hopeless poverty of the mass of the people. He felt that the only way to help them was to understand the principles that govern ‘the conditions and consequences of money making and money spending,’ and so discover how best to make it possible for them to earn more money, that is, to have more power in exchange. He felt that men should be less content with their lot, and that schools and savings banks to replace the public-house would be great factors for regeneration. He used to tell the following anecdote, which touched his friend Mill deeply. Fawcett knew a Wiltshire man who was in the habit of going to bed at dusk. The man explained that this was his custom because he could not afford a candle, and added that, even if he could, he could not read, so why should he have the expense or luxury of light? How was it possible to change this labourer’s horizon, to lift him beyond the degrading pressure of sordid poverty, and to fill him with ambition, when he had to support his wife and himself on nine shillings a week? ‘Let us endeavour,’ Fawcett says, ‘to understand the true causes of poverty. That is the vital problem.’ [Sidenote: Malady of Poverty.] As a Professor of Political Economy he tries, like a careful doctor, painstakingly to study and understand the symptoms of the malady of poverty and misery, refusing to accept any superficial diagnosis. He wants to discover the cause of the disturbance which, like a malignant tumour, vitiates the whole social system. While coping with these problems he kept his mind cool, critical, and impersonal, refusing all quack remedies, and seized every detail that helped him to his goal. In all simplicity he once asked Leslie Stephen why Carlyle called political economy the ‘dismal Science’—not a difficult question for the average man! But Fawcett loved budgets and balance-sheets; they brought to his mind vivid, concrete pictures that could never be dull, and he studied them industriously; industriously enough to realise thoroughly the fallibility of figures and the old truth so often quoted (can the reader bear it again?) that there are three kinds of lies, ‘Lies, Damned Lies, and Statistics.’ Though his respect for his forerunners was great, his beliefs were fearlessly his own. His warm personal relations with country labourers, many of whom he called his intimate friends, never lessened. Once, after a day’s fishing at Salisbury with Wright, he had some beer with a farmer, who told him that the labourers’ wages were to be lowered after the harvest. Fawcett, after vainly protesting, refused more beer and walked home. On his way he met one of his labouring friends, who accounted for his best clothes by saying that he was going to a harvest-home celebration at the church. Fawcett fell into a long reverie, and at last asked Wright how he would like to give thanks for a bountiful harvest when his wages were to be docked of a shilling a week.