With two or three obvious exceptions, these essays are based on direct acquaintance. Most of them were composed under the immediate impression of the characters described. They are offered to the reader (except in the case of the essay on Robert Malthus) as being of this nature—not written coolly, long afterwards, in the perspective of history. The essays on Mr Lloyd George and on Robert Malthus have not been published previously. References to the sources of the other essays are given in an appendix.

In the second section some scattered commentary will be found on the history and progress of economic doctrine; though my main purpose has been biographical. Incidentally, I have sought with some touches of detail to bring out the solidarity and historical continuity of the High Intelligentsia of England, who have built up the foundations of our thought in the two and a half centuries since Locke, in his Essay Concerning Human Understanding, wrote the first modern English book. I relate below (p. 60) the amazing progeny of Sir George Villiers. But the lineage of the High Intelligentsia is hardly less interbred and spiritually intermixed. Let the Villiers Connection fascinate the monarch or the mob and rule, or seem to rule, passing events. There is also a pride of sentiment to claim spiritual kinship with the Locke Connection and that long English line, intellectually and humanly linked with one another, to which the names in my second section belong.