Henry Mayers Hyndman was an English writer and politician, and the founder of the Social Democratic Federation and the National Socialist Party. The son of a wealthy businessman, Hyndman was born 7 March 1842 in London. After being educated at home, he entered Trinity College, Cambridge. Hyndman later recalled: "I had the ordinary education of a well-to-do boy and young man. I read mathematics hard until I went to Cambridge, where I ought, of course, to have read them harder, and then I gave them up altogether and devoted myself to amusement and general literature. Trinity or, for that... matter, any other college, is practically a hot-bed of reaction from the social point of view. The young men regard all who are not technically 'gentlemen' as 'cads,' just as the Athenians counted all who were not Greeks as barbarians. * * * "I was a thorough-going Radical and Republican in those days — theoretically ... with a great admiration for John Stuart Mill, and later, I remember, I regarded John Morley as the coming man." After achieving his degree in 1861 he studied law for two years before deciding to become a journalist.
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