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 IB
 
 CLASSES AND MASSES
 
 BY SAME AUTHOR 
 
 LABOUR AND THE POPULAR WELFARE 
 
 Eighth Thousa>t) 
 
 Crown 8vo. Price Is.
 
 CLASSES AND. MASSES 
 
 WEALTH, WAGES, AND WELFAEE IN 
 THE UNITED KINGDOM 
 
 A HANDBOOK OF SOCIAL FACTS FOR POLITICAL 
 THINKERS AND SPEAKERS 
 
 BY 
 
 ^Y. H. MALLOCK 
 
 LONDON 
 
 ADAM AND CHAELES BLACK 
 
 1896
 
 HC 
 
 PEEFACE 
 
 ^sThe present volume, the substance of which, 
 fe together with the illustrations, originally 
 ^appeared at intervals in the Pall Mall 
 ^Magazine, is addressed to practical people, 
 'who realise how closely social problems are 
 now connected with political ; and it is ad- 
 dressed especially to people who are engaged 
 in political work and speaking. Such people 
 know how easily questions arising from the 
 ^economic condition of the masses may endanger 
 ^the popularity of a government in times other- 
 ■^ wise tranquil ; and desire, but are often un- 
 liable, when such a question confronts them, to 
 bring to its consideration some distinct, if 
 general, knowledge of the main facts under- 
 lying it, and the principles fundamentally 
 ^involved. Now these questions take very 
 ^various forms, each of which is complicated by 
 3= its own special details ; but in all of them are 
 
 3885112
 
 vi PREFACE 
 
 involved certain common facts and principles, 
 which are comparatively few and simple, and 
 with resard to which certain definite informa- 
 tion can be given. The present volume is an 
 attempt to deal with the most important of 
 these last in a w^ay so simple as to render 
 them intelligible to everybody, and to enable 
 any one, without any previous training, to 
 discuss them with confidence on a public 
 platform, and apply them to the arguments 
 and demands of agitators and excitable re- 
 formers. 
 
 The facts and principles to which allusion 
 is now made are divisible into two groups, 
 which may be described as follows. When- 
 ever any demand is made for legislative in- 
 terference with the existing organisation 
 of society, and the natural working of the 
 economic forces embodied in it, such demands 
 are nearly always accompanied by, and indeed 
 are logically based upon, a wholesale indict- 
 ment of society as it now exists ; and the 
 counts in this indictment are familiar enough 
 to all of us. Society, as now organised, is 
 said to be essentially unjust. It is said that 
 its natural, and indeed its necessary, tendency
 
 PREFACE vii 
 
 is to confine the benefits of progress more and 
 more strictly to the few, and to push down the 
 masses of the people into ever-deepening poverty 
 and servitude, rendering their chances of making 
 even a bare living more and more uncertain. 
 Hence, it is argued, arises the obvious necessity 
 of arbitrarily interfering by law with existing 
 social institutions. There has been hardly a 
 single social agitator, during the past twenty 
 years in England, who has not put forward 
 the above statements with regard to society 
 as obvious and incontrovertible truths. It is 
 therefore, before all things, necessary to inquire 
 how far such a hideous picture is correct ; and 
 of the two groups of facts and principles with 
 which this volume deals, one has reference to 
 the character of society as it is — to the natural 
 tendency of the forces embodied in it, and the 
 actual results of their working, as shown by 
 an examination of the general condition of the 
 people at the present moment, and a comparison 
 of it with their condition at former periods. 
 The conclusions to which such an inquiry and 
 comparison lead are in the highest degree 
 striking, and are absolutely unequivocal ; and 
 it is essential to every political speaker that he
 
 viii PREFACE 
 
 should be familiar with them. They comprise 
 an an3^ye^, complete at every point, to the 
 dangerous commonplaces of the agitator ; and 
 the first and last portions of this volume deal 
 with them. 
 
 The facts and principles comprised in the 
 other group have reference not to the natural 
 working of the economic forces that at present 
 exist, but to the manner and extent to which 
 it is proposed to interfere with them. The 
 principal object of such proposed interference 
 is nearly always the same, namely, an increase, 
 by means of legislation, in the wages of the 
 mass of the people generally, or of some par- 
 ticular section of them ; and at the bottom 
 of all such proposals there is always to be 
 found one or other of two theories, and some- 
 times both. One of these theories is, that it is 
 possible to raise the condition of the people 
 as a whole by establishing a minimum wage, 
 sufficient to maintain a man in some given 
 degree of decency and comfort, and prohibiting 
 employers from ever paying less than this. 
 The other is the theory that any standard of 
 livincf assumed to be reasonable for the wage 
 earners in any given industry, can be made to
 
 PREFACE ix 
 
 regulate the prices at which the proceeds of 
 that industry are sold, so as to secure wages for 
 the men by which this standard of living may 
 be maintained. These two theories form the 
 subject of the remainder of this volume. Each 
 is reduced to its simplest elements, and is ex- 
 hibited in connection with facts and principles 
 which are common to all economic life, and 
 which would affect the earnings of the various 
 classes of workers, and the minimum standard 
 of living, as much in a socialistic state as they 
 would in any other. No attempt is made to 
 urge any detailed conclusions on the reader. 
 All that is done is to put before him certain 
 elementary truths on which any sane con- 
 clusions must be based, with regard to each 
 special case as it arises. 
 
 In order to render the information and the 
 arguments conveyed in the following pages as 
 clear and intelligible as possible to the ordinary 
 reader and the ordinary practical man, the 
 statistics and the arguments are alike illus- 
 trated by diagrams and pictures. The latter are 
 used as a species of working model, to show 
 the operation of those natural conditions and 
 universal principles of action by which the
 
 X PREFACE 
 
 distribution of wealth and the amount of men's 
 earnings are reguLT,tcd in every state of society. 
 The former — that is to say the diagrams as 
 distinguished from tlic pictures — are used to 
 convey to the eye, at a single glance, the signifi- 
 cance of the statistical figures. 
 
 As was said just now, these figures, which 
 show us the actual results and tendencies of 
 society as at present organised, constitute 
 the kind of information with which it is most 
 important that the political speaker should 
 familiarise himself ; and accordingly the first 
 question dealt with will be the question of 
 how wealth is distributing itself at the present 
 moment, and what is the natural efiect of 
 modern industrial progress on the financial 
 condition of the working classes, or, in other 
 words, on the great majority of the nation. 
 
 February 1896.
 
 CONTENTS 
 
 CHAPTER I 
 
 HOW IS WEALTH DISTRIBUTING ITSELF 
 
 PAGE 
 
 The ordinary generalisation of the Socialist, and the 
 Emotional Reformer, that the Rich are getting richer, 
 the Poor poorer, the Middle Class disappearing — this is 
 the exact opposite of the Truth ..... 1 
 
 The Sole Fact that makes it plausible — the existence of a 
 certain Residuum. Its approximate Numbers at the 
 present day ......... 3 
 
 Its absolute Increase, but its relative Diminution . . 4 
 
 Pauperism in the years 1850 and 1882. Pauperism at 
 
 Sheffield in the year 1615 4 
 
 The actual and relative Cost of Pauperism from 1700 to 
 
 1880 (illustrated by a diagram) ..... 5 
 
 The Residuum not the Result of the existing System. It is 
 
 rather an Element which has failed to be absorbed by it 6 
 
 The tendency of the existing System, as sho\vn in nine-tenths 
 of the Population, is to make the Poor richer, the Rich 
 slightly poorer, and to augment the Middle Classes . 7 
 
 Precise meaning given here to the words, "Rich," "Poor," 
 
 and " Middle Classes " 8 
 
 "The Working Classes" used to include all with Incomes 
 
 under £150 10 
 
 Growth of the National Income since the year 1775 — its 
 actual Growth, and Growth relative to the Population 
 (illustrated by diagramon page 12) 11 
 
 Relative Increase of the "Working Classes" and the classes 
 that pay Income-tax, between the years 1850 and 1880 
 (with diagram) 14
 
 CONTENTS 
 
 Increase in tho Numbers and Increase of various sections 
 of the Middle Classes and tho Rich (with diagram on 
 page 15) IG 
 
 The Middle Classes, instead of being crushed out, are tho 
 Classes that have increased fastest. (Diagram on page 
 19) 18 
 
 Tlie small body of Millionaires — exceptional Facts relating 
 
 to them 19 
 
 The Rich increasing more slowly than the Middle Classes, 
 and becoming individually slightly poorer, whilst the 
 Middle Classes are becoming individually slightly 
 richer. (Diagram on page 22) ..... 20 
 
 Aggregate Incomes of tho Millionaires, the very Rich, and 
 the Middle Classes, as compared with the entire National 
 Income. (Diagram on page 24) ..... 23 
 
 The Working Classes. Their growth in Wealth far greater 
 
 than that of even the Middle Classes .... 25 
 
 The Extent of this astonishing Growth not generally realised 26 
 
 The Working Classes richer per head at the present day 
 than their Fathers would have been thirty years ago had 
 the whole National Wealth been divided between them. 
 Statistics (and diagram on page 26) .... 28 
 
 Explanation of the sketch at the head of this chapter . . 31 
 
 Proportion of the Working Classes receiving Wages of various 
 
 amounts. (Diagram, page 32) 31 
 
 The Residuum represents not general Economic Tendencies, 
 
 but an exception to them 32 
 
 CHAPTER II 
 
 THE MINIMUM OF HUMANE LIVING 
 
 The doctrine of a "Living Wage" true within certain 
 
 limits 34 
 
 The idea of a "Minimum Standard" being accepted, how is 
 
 this standard to be determined ? 35 
 
 The great Coal-Strike and the Minimum Standard . . 36 
 
 Vague ideas as to what the Minimum Standard, as a General 
 
 Standard, is . . . . . . . . .38 
 
 Sentimental Misconception of the typical Human Lot . . 39
 
 CONTENTS 
 
 A Itlinimum Standard of Living, though adopted by Senti- 
 ment as a Principle, is necessarily limited, practically, 
 by external Facts — ....... 41 
 
 And firstly, by the Amount of the National Income at the 
 
 time .41 
 
 It would therefore differ greatly in various countries. (Diagi-am, 
 
 page 43) 42 
 
 The practical limit of the Minimum Standard, supplied by 
 the Income made by the Cultivator of the Worst Soil 
 allowed to be cultivated .45 
 
 Detailed Explanation of this Statement .... 47 
 
 The Maximum Income of the poorest class of Cultivators 
 
 cannot be more than the value of their total Produce . 48 
 
 Qualities of Land in the United Kingdom. Amount of Land 
 
 of each Quality (with diagram on page 50) ... 49 
 
 Unequal position of Equal Men on Unequal Soils (with 
 
 diagram) ......... 51 
 
 The same Fact illustrated more fully (with diagram, page 
 
 53) 52 
 
 So long as we acquiesce in the poorest Soils being cultivated 
 at all, their total Produce must form the limit of our 
 Minimum Standard of Living 54 
 
 Though this may be raised, and has been raised with the 
 progress of the Arts, etc., and is modified by the circum- 
 stances of different Industries ..... 60 
 
 CHAPTER III 
 
 WAGES AND THE PRODUCTS OF WORK 
 
 The above conclusion connected with a wider one . . 62 
 
 Recapitulation of preceding argument (with diagi'am) . . 63 
 Remission of all Rent to the Cultivators of poorest Soils 
 would hardly affect the question of Rent on superior Soils, 
 either in principle or practice (with diagi'am) . . 64 
 
 The subject of the Minimum Standard, or Income of the 
 
 poorest Cultivator, resumed ...... 67 
 
 Analysis of his Income. The larger part consists not of what 
 he produces himself, but of what he gets in exchange for 
 his products 68
 
 CONTENTS 
 
 PACE 
 
 This Fact illustratoil by a Community of throe Men (with 
 
 liiagrain on pages 68 and 70) ...... 69 
 
 The Broad Producer, the Clothes Producer, and the Maker of 
 
 Furniture 71 
 
 How the Income of each consists mainly of the Products of 
 
 the other (with diagram on page 70) . . . .72 
 
 Analysis of what must happen if these Incomes increase (with 
 
 diagram on page 72) 73 
 
 The Increment in the case of each Producer depends on what 
 
 others will give him for his products .... 75 
 
 This is equally true whether "the Producer" is the indi- 
 vidual wage-earner, or a body consisting of wage-earners 
 and a Capitalist or Landlord (with diagram on pages 74 
 
 and 75) 76 
 
 ■ We may therefore treat Wages as if the entire value of the 
 entire Product of each industry was divided equally 
 amongst the Workmen 77 
 
 The Workman's Income depends on what the rest of the 
 Community can be induced to give him for what he 
 produces 78 
 
 The Strike Leaders in the great Coal-Strike tried to persuade 
 the Colliers that what the Community would give 
 depended on what the Colliers wanted .... 79 
 
 The case of Coal Supply, as regards the Community, ex- 
 amined (with diagram) . 80 
 
 Wages must follow prices . . . . . . .81 
 
 Except in the case of absolute necessaries, when produced by 
 
 monopolists 83 
 
 This Truth illustrated by referring again to the imaginary 
 
 Community already dealt with (with diagram) . . 84 
 
 The Wages of the Maker of Superfluities must follow prices . 90 
 
 Application of this Analysis to the demands of the British 
 
 Colliers. (Diagrams, page 93) 92 
 
 As Civilisation advances, Wages depend more and more com- 
 pletely on the Consumers, or the price they will consent 
 to pay 95
 
 CONTENTS 
 
 CHAPTER IV 
 
 THE CENSUS AND THE CONDITION OF THE PEOPLE 
 
 PAGE 
 
 The actual Condition of the People of the United Kingdom, 
 
 as illustrated by a variety of salient Facts . . .93 
 
 The Capital Value of the Country, and the elements that 
 
 constitute its Capital (with diagram on page 101) . . 99 
 
 Money, Land, Houses, Furniture, Public Works, Gas and 
 
 Water Works, Eailways, etc. 102 
 
 The Income that comes into this Country from Investments 
 
 in other Countries , . . . . . . .103 
 
 Special significance of this Income in argument Avith Social- 
 istic Agitators 104 
 
 The Population — the large proportion of it that is composed 
 of Children ; the small proportion that is composed of 
 adult Males (with diagram, page 105) .... 104 
 
 Married Persons, Bachelors, and Spinsters (with diagram, 
 
 page 107) 106 
 
 The Proportion of the Population that lives at leisure on in- 
 dependent Incomes . . . . . . .108 
 
 The extremely small number of this Class . . . .110 
 
 Were its members made to work the general result would be 
 
 inappreciable . . . . . . . .111 
 
 The Housing of the Population . . . . . .111 
 
 The number of Families in England and Wales housed respec- 
 tively in dwellings of one room, two rooms, three rooms, 
 four rooms, and more than four rooms (with diagram, 
 page 113) 112 
 
 The tendency of the Changes that are taking place in this 
 respect illustrated by the history of Scotland during the 
 past ten years (with diagram, page 115) . . . 114 
 
 The natural Economic Tendencies of the times, illustrated by 
 the Increase and Decrease of various callings and in- 
 dustries (with diagi-am on page 119) . . . .117 
 
 Clergy of the Established Church 117 
 
 Nonconformist Clergy . . . . . . . .117 
 
 Roman Catholic Clergy 117 
 
 Agriculturers, Farmers, Market Gardeners . . . .118 
 
 The Cotton Industry, Domestic Servants . . . .118
 
 CONTENTS 
 
 PAGE 
 
 School Teachers, Commercial Travellers, Shopkeepers, Clerks 120 
 
 Small Businesses not being crushed out .... 121 
 Growth of the Classes that minister to the wellbeiug of the 
 
 Poor 121 
 
 Enormous Increase in the Business of the Post-office Savings 
 
 Banks 122 
 
 Relative Strength of the Establishment and other Religious 
 
 Bodies (with diagram on page 124) .... 123 
 The Productivity of Agriculture, as related to Land Systems. 
 
 A Comparison between certain Agricultural Facts in 
 
 various Countries (with diagi-am on page 129) . 125 
 
 The Housing of the Poor : the Reasons for its Deficiency . 129 
 
 Not due on the whole to the Extortion of Ground Landlords 129 
 
 The Actual Rental of the United Kingdom, urban and rural. 130 
 
 Grotesque and ignorant Exaggeration of Radical Agitators . 130 
 
 Methods of arriving at the Total 131 
 
 The Ground Rental of London, as distinct from the Total 
 
 Rental 132 
 
 The Rental of the Country, as generally stated in Radical 
 
 Publications, has no relation to truth whatsoever . . 134 
 The varying degrees of Overcrowding in the Principal Towns 
 
 in England (with diagram on page 135) .... 134 
 Rental is obviously not the Determining Factor . . .136 
 
 The Facts of the case full of hope for the moderate Reformer 138 
 
 Concluding observations 138
 
 CHAPTER I 
 
 HOW IS WEALTH DISTRIBUTING ITSELF? 
 
 The general tendency of our modern con- 
 ditions of industry, so far as concerns the 
 distribution of wealth generally, was, up to a 
 very recent period, altogether misunderstood ; 
 and in many quarters it is so still. It was, 
 and by multitudes of people it still is, be- 
 lieved to be the exact reverse of what events 
 and investigations show it to be. The cele- 
 brated Socialist writer, Karl Marx, not 
 thirty years ago, laid it down as an incon- 
 trovertible fact that under our existing in- 
 dustrial system three things were happening : 
 
 \^
 
 2 HO IV IS WEALTH DISTRIBUTING ITSELF? 
 
 that the majority of the community were 
 constantly getting poorer ; that moderate 
 fortunes were steadily disappearing ; and that 
 all wealth, beyond the bare means of living, 
 was steadily passing into fewer and fewer 
 hands, so that the ultimate result would be 
 sooner or later this — a nation of slaves living 
 on starvation wages on the one side, and a few 
 "great capitalist lords," as Marx called them, 
 on the other. This view of the case, fraught 
 as it was and as Marx meant it to be, with 
 promise or menace of some vast social catas- 
 trophe, has been not only adopted by his own 
 Socialistic followers, and used by them as a 
 text in all their popular preaching, but 
 has also been put forward as the result of 
 independent observation by sentimentalists, 
 philanthropists, and reformers of all kinds, 
 — Carlyle, for instance, may be mentioned 
 amongst the number, — and it has embodied 
 itself in a saying which has become almost 
 proverbial : that the rich are getting richer, 
 and the poor poorer, and thus the middle 
 classes are being crushed out. My aim 
 in the present paper is to show as clearly 
 as possible the entire fallacy of this view ;
 
 HOW IS WEALTH DISTRIBUTING ITSELF? 3 
 
 but first it will be well to direct the 
 reader's attention to a fact which makes it 
 plausible, and accounts for its origin and 
 persistence. 
 
 Speaking in round numbers, there exists in 
 this country to-day a population consisting of 
 about 700,000 families, or 3,000,000 persons, 
 whose means of subsistence are either in- 
 sufficient, or barely sufficient, or precarious, 
 and the conditions of whose life generally are 
 either hard or degrading, or both. A large 
 portion of them may, without any sentimental 
 exaggeration, be called miserable, and all of 
 them may be called unfortunate. There is, 
 further, this observation to be made. People 
 who are in want of the bare necessaries of 
 life can hardly be worse off absolutely at one 
 period than another ; but if, whilst their own 
 poverty remains the same, the riches of other 
 classes increase, they do, in a certain sense, 
 become worse off relatively. The statement, 
 therefore, that the poor are getting constantly 
 poorer, is, in this relative sense, true of a 
 certain part of the population ; and that part 
 is now nearly equal in numbers to the entire 
 population of the country at the time of the
 
 4 HOW IS WEALTH DISTRIBUTING ITSELF f 
 
 Norman Conquest. Such being the case, it 
 is of course obvious that persons who, for 
 purposes of either benevolence or agitation, 
 are concerned to discover want, misfortune, 
 and misery, find it easier to do so now than at 
 any former period. But this view of the 
 question, though true so far as it goes, is, if 
 taken by itself, altogether misleading, and 
 points to conclusions the exact reverse of the 
 truth. This unfortunate class, though it has 
 increased in numbers absolutely, has grown 
 less and less numerous relatively to the entire 
 population ; and the periods during which its 
 absolute growth has been most rapid have 
 been the periods during which its relative 
 decrease has been most rapid also. In illus- 
 tration of this fact it may be mentioned that, 
 whereas in 1850 there were 9 paupers to every 
 200 inhabitants, in 1882 there were only 5; 
 whilst, to turn for a moment to a far more 
 distant time, so as to compare the new 
 industrial system with the old, in the year 
 1615 a survey of Sheffield, already a manu- 
 facturing centre, showed that the " begging 
 poor," who " could not live without the charity 
 of their neighbours," actually amounted to
 
 HOW IS WEALTH DISTRIBUTING ITSELF? 5 
 
 one-third of the population, or 725 households 
 out of 2207. Further, although, as I 
 observed just now, it is in a certain 
 sense true to say 
 
 that, relatively to 
 other classes the un- 
 fortunate class has 
 been getting poorer, 
 the real tendency of 
 events is expressed 
 in a much truer way 
 by saying that all 
 other classes have 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 -' 
 
 - 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 ■ 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 -_ 
 
 ';^c 
 
 ^foo 
 
 fS-/s-- 
 
 fiJO- 
 
 
 --■soc 
 
 -^S'y 
 
 fSJO 
 
 --fJSO 
 
 'S-sc 
 
 fS^ 
 
 Fig. 1, 
 
 The Actual and Relative cost of Pauperism for 180 Years. 
 
 The entire columns represent the actual amouuts spent ; the dotted line 
 represents the increase or decrease of these amounts relative to the national 
 income. 
 
 been getting more and more removed from 
 poverty. That the existence of the unfortunate 
 class is at once dangerous and deplorable is not 
 to be denied. From certain points of view, and
 
 6 HOW IS WEALTH DISTRIBUTING ITSELF.^ 
 
 for certain purposes, it is impossible to treat 
 the fact too gravely or too earnestly ; but 
 those w'lio most fully realise its gravity are 
 constantly betrayed into misapprehending its 
 significance. The unfortunate class of to-day 
 is not in any sense a sign or product of any- 
 thing special in our modern industrial system. 
 A similar class existed before that system was 
 born ; and that system, as I have said, has 
 relatively reduced and not increased its 
 numbers. The right way, indeed, in which to 
 regard it is, not as a product of that system, 
 but rather as somethino; which has resisted it 
 — not as a part of it, but as something which 
 has failed to be absorbed by it ; and the real 
 problem for philanthropists and reformers is, 
 not how to interfere with existing economic 
 tendencies, but how, so far as possible, to bring 
 the residuum under their influence. In con- 
 sidering, therefore, what these economic 
 tendencies are, we must put the unfortunate 
 class altogether on one side : that is to say, 
 out of the 37,000,000 inhabitants of this 
 country we must put aside the exceptional case 
 of 3,000,000, and confine our attention to the 
 representative case of 34,000,000.
 
 HOW IS WEALTH DISTRIBUTING ITSELF? 7 
 
 If we do this we shall find that the saying 
 which I began with quoting, namely, that the 
 rich are getting richer, the poor are getting 
 poorer, and the middle classes are being 
 crushed out, is not only a not true statement 
 of facts, but is in every word an absolute and 
 exact inversion of them. We shall find that 
 the poor are getting richer, the rich, on an 
 average, getting poorer, and that of all classes 
 in the community the middle class is growing 
 the fastest. 
 
 There is a popular, but very misleading 
 saying, to the effect that statistics can be made 
 to prove anything. This is true only if the 
 figures are false, or if the facts or things 
 referred to are not clearly defined. Actual 
 falsification of figures is not perhaps a common 
 off'ence ; and those which I shall give presently 
 are taken from the most authoritative sources. 
 But figures which are accurate in themselves 
 can be made altogether untrustworthy if the 
 facts or things they refer to are described in 
 ambiguous language. Socialist writers, for 
 instance, are constantly issuing leaflets, in 
 which it is declared that " the workers," " the 
 producers," or "the labourers," get less than a
 
 8 HO IV /S WEALTH DISTRIBUTISG ITSELF? 
 
 quarter of the total national income, whilst 
 the idle classes, who live on them, get more than 
 three-quarters of it. The figures these persons 
 quote are not their owtl invention ; but what 
 is their own invention is their definition of the 
 word "producers" — a definition which they 
 carefully abstain from giving, but which, if 
 their figures have any foundation in fact, is 
 obviously inconsistent with all ordinary usage, 
 and is contradicted by most of their o"wti 
 reasoning. In order, therefore, that the reader 
 may know exactly what I am talking about, 
 and eive their right significance to the figures 
 I am about to c[uote, let me state the precise 
 meaning which I shall attach to three 
 important terms — " the working classes," " the 
 middle classes," and " the rich." By the 
 " working classes " I mean that portion of the 
 population which does not pay income-tax, 
 and which consists of individuals and families 
 with less than £150 a year. By "the middle 
 classes," which I shall divide into tw^o sections, 
 I mean individuals or families with incomes 
 ranging from £150 to £1000; and by "the 
 rich," whom I shall divide into diflerent 
 sections also, I mean individuals or families
 
 HO IV IS WEALTH DISTRIBUTING ITSELF? 9 
 
 with incomes above £1000. It is hardly 
 necessary to observe that, for purposes like the 
 present, our classification of the rich and the 
 middle classes is altogether financial, and that 
 the term " middle classes " is used without any 
 of its social meanings ; but it will be perhaps 
 desirable to say a few words in defence of the 
 application of the term "working classes" to 
 all individuals or families with less than £150 
 a year. These classes, no doubt, include a 
 considerable number of persons who are not 
 manual labourers ; though when we come to 
 consider that, according to the latest evidence, 
 the artisans who earn very nearly £150 amount 
 to at least 180,000, and that in certain 
 industries many of them earn more, it will be 
 seen that the income-tax test is more accurate 
 than might be supposed. At all events, 
 whether the classes in question are manual 
 labourers or not, they are, with very un- 
 important exceptions, wage-earners, that is to 
 say, for whatever money they receive they give 
 work which is estimated at at least the same 
 money value. A schoolmaster, for instance, 
 who receives £150 a year gives in return 
 teaching which is valued at the same sum.
 
 lo HOJV /S WEALTH DISTRIBUTIXG ITSELF? 
 
 School-teaching is wealth just as much as a 
 school-house ; it figures in all estimates as part 
 of the income of the nation ; and therefore the 
 schoolmaster is a producer just as much as the 
 school-builder. The classes, then, with in- 
 comes of less than £150 are, as a whole, 
 producers in this sense of the word, that 
 whenever a sum of money is paid to them, a 
 corresponding sum is estimated as being added 
 to the general wealth ; and it is thus substan- 
 tially accurate to speak of them as the 
 " working classes." Anyhow, whether the 
 reader approve of the term or not, he knows 
 the sense in which I am using it ; and that is 
 the essential thing. 
 
 Let us now proceed to facts. Before we 
 inquire how the modern industrial system has 
 affected the distribution of wealth, we must 
 obtain a clear idea of how it has affected the 
 production of it. Ordinary people are entirely 
 unaware of what the growth of wealth in this 
 country during the past hundred years has 
 been. They are aware, in a vague way, that 
 the country has grown richer; but much of 
 this growth they attribute to the growth of 
 population ; and, as I observed just now,
 
 HOW IS WEALTH DISTRIBUTING ITSELF? ir 
 
 many of them vaguely believe that, relatively 
 to the population, the country has grown 
 poorer. The real state of the case is exhibited 
 in Fig. 2, on the next page, which will show 
 the reader more at a single glance than he 
 could probably gather from whole pages of ex- 
 planation. The shortest column represents 
 the income of the country as it was in the year 
 1775 ; the taller columns, which have dates 
 attached to them, represent its growth from 
 that time to the present. The lower and lighter 
 portion represents what the growth of wealth 
 would have been had the productive power of 
 industry undergone no development, and had 
 wealth grown only on account of, and in pro- 
 portion to, the growth of the population. The 
 upper and darker portion represents the growth 
 of wealth which has been due entirely to 
 machinery, science, and organisation ; and both 
 portions together represent the actual growth 
 in its entirety. The lower portion, besides 
 representing the growth of wealth accounted 
 for by the growth of population, will, as is ob- 
 vious, represent the growth of population also. 
 Here, then, in their broad outlines, are the 
 facts whose details and whose social meaning
 
 12 HOW IS WEALTH DISTRIBUTING ITSELF? 
 
 we have to examine and analyse. We see 
 what this astonishing growth of wealth has 
 been. We must next see how, and amongst 
 what classes, it has l)een distributed. 
 Our survey of the growth of the na- 
 tional income as a whole extended 
 some way back into the last cen- 
 tury ; but we shall find ourselves 
 oblio-ed, in considerino; its dis- 
 tribution, to confine our atten- 
 tion to more limited periods, 
 accordino- to the fulness of 
 the information acces- 
 sible as to the various 
 points involved. I 
 
 will deal first with 
 the case of the 
 
 ^_^^^ II 111 I 
 
 riiLLiOM5 \if/6c J'r/s \i'2sa /'iocj/sva ^C-cc. ^scc ^^so J'/2oc/fj€0. 
 
 Fig. 2. 
 
 rich and the middle classes, showing how the 
 growth of wealth has afi"ected them, and with 
 deo-ree of truth it can be said that the former 
 are growing richer and the latter being crushed
 
 HO IV IS WEALTH DISTRIBUTING ITSELF? 13 
 
 out. Professor Leone Levi, about ten years 
 ago, treated this subject, within limits, in a 
 most exhaustive way. His inquiries did not 
 extend farther back than 1850 ; but the 
 period which he covered happened to be the 
 period when the modern industrial system 
 was reaching its fullest development, and 
 when the social changes produced by it were 
 becoming most rapid and remarkable, I shall 
 therefore coniSne myself to giving, in a simple 
 and intelligible form, the results which were 
 arrived at by this eminent statistician, but 
 which, owing to the form in which they were 
 stated by him, have failed hitherto to reach 
 the popular ear, and have certainly never 
 been grasped by the imagination of practical 
 politicians. 
 
 In the first place, we must realise the broad 
 fact that, rapid as has been the increase of the 
 population as a whole, the increase of the 
 classes that pay income - tax has been far 
 more rapid. During the period of which 
 I am speaking the population, as a whole, 
 increased from 27,000,000 to 35,000,000; 
 the section of the population living on in- 
 comes that paid income-tax increased from
 
 14 HOW IS WEALTH DISTRIBUTING ITSELF? 
 
 L,500,000 to 4,700,000. Thus, 
 if the increase of the whole was 
 in the proportion of 27 to 35, 
 the increase of the section in 
 question was in the proportion 
 of '17 to 84. The difference 
 between the two rates of in- 
 crease is illustrated in Fig. 3. 
 It is essential to bear the 
 above fact in mind, because it 
 shows that the growth in wealth 
 
 of the 
 
 rich and 
 
 the middle 
 
 /sso 
 rnrnrmr 
 
 YSSO. 
 
 
 /srr 
 
 POPui-ATION 
 
 
 Fig. 3. 
 
 classes does not mean the growth of fortunes
 
 i6 NO IV IS WEALTH DISTRIBUTING ITSELF? 
 
 already established, but the constant creation 
 of new fortunes, small or large, by individuals 
 risins: from the ranks of the working classes. 
 
 Let us now divide the middle classes from 
 the rich, according to the definition I have 
 already given, and see which of the two have 
 increased most. The number of incomes 
 between £150 and £1000 have increased (in 
 round numbers) from 300,000 to 990,000. 
 The incomes above £1000 have increased 
 (in round numbers) from 24,000 to 60,000. 
 Thus the middle class has been increased by 
 690,000 new families, whilst the rich class has 
 been increased by only 36,000. But not only 
 is there this enormous disparity between their 
 actual increase : there is a considerable dis- 
 parity also between their relative increase ; 
 and again it is the middle class which has 
 increased the more largely. The middle class 
 has increased numerically in the proportion of 
 3 to 10 ; the rich class has increased only in 
 the proportion of 3 to 8. In Fig. 4 these two 
 classes are subdivided : the middle class into 
 persons with incomes between £150 and £600, 
 and persons with incomes between £600 and 
 £1000 ; and the rich are subdivided into
 
 HOW IS WEALTH DISTRIBUTING ITSELF? 17 
 
 persons with incomes between £1000 and 
 £2000, persons with incomes between £2000 
 and £3000, and persons with incomes of 
 £3000 and upwards. The lower columns in 
 the diagram represent the relative magnitudes 
 of the various incomes dealt with. The black 
 columns represent the proportion in which the 
 number of persons enjoying each class of 
 income in the year 1850 increased between 
 that year and the year 1881 ; and the arrows 
 23ointing downwards represent the actual 
 number of new incomes added in each case. 
 The reader is thus able to see at a glance how 
 grotesque is the fallacy that represents the 
 middle classes as being crushed out. He will 
 see that, in absolute contradiction to the 
 popular view, the middle classes are increas- 
 ing with far greater rapidity than the rich — 
 in fact, that their increase is the most 
 distinctive and extraordinary feature of the 
 time ; whilst, if we compare their increase 
 with that of the working classes, it becomes 
 more startling and more extraordinary still. 
 Fig. 5 will help the reader to realise this. 
 The total population increased from about 
 27,500,000 to 35,000,000 ; whilst the income-
 
 i8 HOIV IS WEALTH DISTRIBUTING ITSELF? 
 
 tax-paying population was, as has been said 
 already, 1,500,000 in 1850, and more than 
 4,500,000 in 1881. If, then, we deduct these 
 two amounts from the totals at the two 
 dates, we have a working class population of 
 26,000,000 in 1850, and of 30,500,000 in 
 1881. The working classes have increased, 
 therefore, by about 15 per cent, whilst the 
 middle classes had increased by more than 
 300 per cent. 
 
 The only facts that seem, even for a 
 moment, to coincide, however loosely, with 
 the popular view, are as follows : — First, there 
 is the fact that the increase per cent of the 
 classes with incomes of more than £3000 a 
 year has been greater than that of the classes 
 wdth incomes between that amount and £1000. 
 The actual increase, however, of the former is 
 more than three times as great as the actual 
 increase of the latter — that of the former 
 being 27,000, and that of the latter 9000, 
 whilst the total numbers in 1881 were re- 
 spectively 45,000 and 15,000.^ And, however 
 
 ^ According to the facts compiled by Professor Leone Levi, aided 
 by information given by Mr. Gripper of the Inland Revenue, there 
 were in the year 1881 about 15,000 incomes in the United Kingdom
 
 HOW IS WEALTH DISTRIBUTING ITSELF? 19 
 
 the different sections of the rich class 
 may compare with one another in 
 point of growth, even the smallest 
 section, which has grown the fastest, 
 has been entirely distanced by the 
 yet faster growth of the middle class. 
 There remains, however, another set 
 of facts to be mentioned. If we sub- 
 divide the rich class yet farther, we 
 shall find that there is one section 
 which has not only increased in num- 
 bers, but whose members have grown 
 richer as individuals. This is the 
 richest class — the class composed of 
 
 persons with 
 £50,000 a 
 year and 
 over. In 
 1850 the 
 average in- 
 come of 
 such persons 
 
 was about ^sso fssf 
 £72,000; in ^^'^^'"'^ class£s 
 
 Fig. 5. 
 
 
 
 
 <n 
 
 
 r 
 
 
 
 
 
 _, 
 
 OT 
 
 _j 
 
 z 
 
 
 
 
 T. 
 
 J 
 
 
 -1 
 
 ^ 
 
 E 
 
 
 
 VD 
 
 fO 
 
 rsi 
 
 
 a 
 Z 
 < 
 
 V) 
 
 O 
 
 X 
 
 o 
 o 
 
 CO 
 
 < 
 
 t/) 
 
 O 
 
 X 
 
 O 
 esi 
 
 ysso 
 
 ClASSSS 
 
 of over £3000 a year, 3000 of over £10,000 a year, and 230 of over 
 £50,000.
 
 20 HOW IS U 'EA L TH DIS TRIE UTING ITSELF ? 
 
 1881 it was about £80,000. This class, however, 
 is altogether exceptional. It consisted in 1881 
 of only 230 persons out of the G0,000 who 
 had more than £1000 a year ; and the amount 
 of its asjo-reijate income was not more than 4-^ 
 per cent of the total assessed to income-tax. 
 With the single exception of this handful of 
 persons, the rich class has not only increased 
 in numbers much more slowly than the middle 
 class, but the persons composing it have indi- 
 vidually grown poorer instead of richer ; whilst 
 the persons composing the larger section of the 
 middle class have grown individually richer 
 as well as more numerous. The incomes, in- 
 deed, of those who have between £600 and 
 £1000 a year have remained nearly stationary, 
 the average income being, for both 1850 and 
 1881, £735 ; but the incomes of those with less 
 than £600 have increased on the average by 
 something like 4 per cent ; whilst the incomes 
 of the rich, with the exception of 3000 persons 
 — that is to say, the incomes of nineteen- 
 twentieths of the whole body, possessing 
 sixteen -twentieths of that body's aggregate 
 wealth — have decreased on an average by very 
 nearly 7 per cent. This is represented in
 
 HOW IS WEALTH DISTRIBUTING ITSELF? 21 
 
 Fig. 6, p. 22. The sections of the column 
 marked A, B, C, and D, represent the relative 
 amounts of the aggregate incomes possessed by 
 the various classes with which we are dealing. 
 A represents the total of all incomes between 
 £150 and £600; B the total of all incomes 
 between £600 and £1000; C the total of all 
 incomes between £1000 and £50,000 ; and D 
 the total of all incomes of £50,000 and over. 
 The lines rising to the points a and c represent 
 the increase of the average individual incomes 
 of the bulk of the middle class, and of the 
 millionaires in 1881 as compared with 1850, 
 whilst the lines sinking to the point h repre- 
 sent the average decrease of the individual 
 incomes of the great body of the rich during 
 the same period. 
 
 It will thus be seen that the small body of 
 millionaires is the only class who, during the 
 thirty years in question, justified the popular 
 statement that the rich were growing richer ; 
 and, with regard to this class, there are three 
 things to be said. Seventy-seven of the in- 
 comes comprised in it were derived from 
 business ; and with the growth of each of 
 these business incomes at least as much
 
 D 
 
 OVER 
 J^SO.OOO. 
 
 |Mt«v£ASF 0' 
 4-/i 1^' CfNT 
 
 \^ jier ClN-R 
 
 Fig. 6.
 
 HOW IS WEALTH DISTRIBUTING ITSELF? 23 
 
 wealth was added to the nation at large as 
 was taken by the recipient of the income. 
 Sixty -six of such incomes were derived from 
 land; and since 1880 these landed incomes 
 have not increased, but decreased. They have 
 decreased by 14 per cent in England, and by 
 1 3 per cent in Scotland ; whilst, taking these 
 great incomes as a whole, and comparing them 
 with the wealth of the nation, their amount 
 is so small that they might be merged in the 
 general wealth, or altogether abstracted from 
 it, without appreciably affecting the national 
 wellbeing. The ordinary agitator delights to 
 occupy himself with millionaires, and to re- 
 present their expenditure as some fatal drain 
 on the resources of the community, or a gold 
 mine from which a progressive income-tax 
 might extract some colossal revenue. In 
 Fig. 7, p. 24, the column marked A will illus- 
 trate how fallacious such ideas as these are. The 
 three columns A, B, C, each represent the total 
 national income, estimated at £1,300,000,000. 
 In column A the minute black section at the 
 top represents the total income of the million- 
 aires — that is to say, £22,000,000 out of 
 £1,300,000,000. This sum, if divided amongst
 
 B. 
 
 C. 
 
 'II 
 
 Fig. 7.
 
 HOW IS WEALTH DISTRIBUTING ITSELF? 25 
 
 the population in equal shares, would yield 
 each inhabitant a dividend of one shilling a 
 month. In column B the shaded section re- 
 presents the total incomes of all those persons 
 whose incomes range from £5000 to £50,000 ; 
 and the shaded section in column C represents 
 the total income of the middle classes. 
 
 Let us now turn to the most important 
 question of all — the condition of the working 
 classes. It is impossible to imagine a more 
 complete contradiction of the conventional 
 view of the agitator than is offered by the 
 facts of the case. Instead of getting poorer, 
 instead of finding it harder to gain a living, 
 the working classes have increased in wealth 
 far faster than any other class in the com- 
 munity. They have not, indeed, increased in 
 numbers so fast as the middle class ; but this 
 is owing to the very simple reason that they 
 have supplied the middle class with most of 
 its new members ; and what the middle class 
 has thus gained in numbers the working class 
 has lost. But, alike in point of aggregate 
 income and average individual income, the 
 progress of the middle class is altogether 
 dwarfed by that of the working class — a pro-
 
 26 HOW IS WEALTH DISTRUWTING ITSELF? 
 
 gress the extent of which is absolutely un- 
 known to the majority of our countrymen, but 
 which forms probably the most extraordinary 
 phenomenon in the social history of the world. 
 The general outlines of this progress 
 can be seen at a glance by referring 
 to Fig. 8. The series of rising 
 columns in both divisions of the 
 figure represent the national income 
 at the several dates named. The 
 darker portions, at the bottom, re- 
 present the 
 working 
 class in- 
 come ; the 
 lighter por- 
 tions repre- 
 sent the 
 incomes of 
 
 1880 
 
 £230 i.300 iSaO i525 
 Uu^Q.ti. y'4uj&*.s XiLua^ts M^iuofis, 
 
 £230 X600 iSOO 11300 
 
 fluJOMS. MiUJCHS ¥lLUOM% MlLUONS. 
 
 Fig. 8. 
 
 the rich 
 
 and the middle classes. Series 2 shows 
 the actual growth of the whole actual income, 
 which has risen from about £240,000,000 at 
 the end of the last century to £1,300,000,000 
 (as was just stated) now ; whilst the in- 
 come of the working classes has risen from
 
 now IS WEALTH DISTRIBUTING ITSELF? 27 
 
 about £110,000,000 to £660,000,000. This 
 actual increase, however, considered by it- 
 self, does not tell us the thing we are con- 
 cerned to know; for the population having 
 increased enormously as well as the wealth, 
 we are left doubtful whether the poor have 
 really secured larger individual incomes, or 
 whether there are merely more of them with 
 the same incomes or even smaller ones. The 
 columns in Series 1 will make this point clear. 
 Of the four columns comprised in it, the first 
 represents the same thing as the first column 
 in Series 2, namely, the income of the country 
 in the year 1800. The other three columns 
 in Series 1 represent, not the actual increase 
 of the national income, but its increase minus 
 the increase due to increased population : in 
 other words, it represents the increased in- 
 comes produced by the same number of persons 
 as constituted the whole population in 1800 — 
 that is to say, about 15,000,000. Here we 
 get rid completely of all the confusion which 
 the increase of population causes ; and each 
 step in the growth of the income, as re- 
 presented thus, means a corresponding growth 
 in the income of the individual. This figure
 
 28 HOW IS WEALTH DISTRIBUTING ITSELF? 
 
 exhibits two facts whicli, if one may judge 
 by the language used by writers and public 
 speakers whenever the Labour Question or the 
 Social Question is discussed, are altogether 
 unknown to the public of this country. The 
 two facts are as follows : — During the first 
 sixty years of this century the income of the 
 working classes rose to such an extent that in 
 the year 1860 it was equal (all deductions for 
 the increase of pojDulation being made) to the 
 income of all classes in the year 1800. This 
 is indicated by the arrow A. But there is a 
 far more extraordinary fact to follow, and 
 that is, that a result precisely similar has been 
 accomplished since in one-half of the time. 
 In 1880 the income of the workino- classes was 
 (all deductions for the increase of population 
 being made) more than equal to the income of 
 all classes in the j^ear 1850. This is indicated 
 by the arrow marked B. Thus, the working 
 classes in 1860 were in precisely the same 
 pecuniary position as the working classes in 
 1800 would have been had the entire wealth 
 of the kingdom been in their hands ; and the 
 working classes of to-day are in a better 
 pecuniary position than their fathers w^ould
 
 HOW IS WEALTH DISTRIBUTING ITSELF? 29 
 
 have been could they have plundered and 
 divided between them the wealth of every rich 
 and middle -class man at the time of the 
 building of the first great Exhibition. The 
 wildest Socialist, the most discontented 
 Radical, cannot possibly claim for the people 
 more wealth than exists, no matter what 
 revolution he might have it in his power to 
 accomplish ; and few Socialists imagine that 
 it would be possible to redistribute every- 
 thing. And yet, in actual fact, this miracle has 
 taken place — has taken place twice in the course 
 of three generations — and has taken place, 
 not only without any attempt at revolution, 
 but in consequence of those very institutions 
 against which would-be revolutionists protest. 
 The figure gives in round numbers the 
 aggregate amount of the working-class income, 
 and also the income of all classes, at the 
 various dates indicated, both as they actually 
 were for the whole population, and also as 
 they were relative to a population of the same 
 size. 
 
 In dealing with such vast sums as are at 
 present in question, we must, of course, not 
 look for any impracticable accuracy ; but there
 
 30 HOW IS WEALTH DISTRIBUTING ITSELF? 
 
 is substantially a complete unanimity amongst 
 statisticians with regard to the broad facts of 
 the case, and the slight discrepancies between 
 the respective calculations are so small that, if 
 expressed in a diagram, the eye could hardly 
 detect them. 
 
 These facts form a curious comment on a 
 paper entitled " The Case for Labour," by a 
 Labour member of the present House of 
 Commons, which appeared in The Pall Mall 
 Magazine a year or two ago. The whole of 
 the writer's observations were coloured by that 
 very fallacy to which I referred at starting — by 
 the idea that, whatever might be the case '^dth 
 the rich and the middle classes, the working 
 classes were constantly getting poorer, whilst 
 the dijficulties of finding occupation were be- 
 coming greater. The fallacy involved in this 
 latter supposition is as great as that involved 
 in the former ; and those who are in doubt as 
 to this point will do well to consult Professor 
 Marshall's remarks on it in his Principles of 
 Economics. It is unnecessary to dwell upon it 
 here. It is sufficient to confine ourselves to 
 the mere question of wages, and to insist once 
 more on the fact that the vast body of the
 
 HOW IS WEALTH DISTRIBUTING ITSELF? 31 
 
 people — the working classes as distinguislied 
 from the rich and the middle classes — have 
 increased in wealth more rapidly than any 
 other class of the community, and that Mr. 
 Giffen is perfectly right in saying that nearly 
 the whole of the advantages gained during the 
 past half-century have gone to them. 
 
 The sketch at the head of this chapter 
 presents a sort of epitome of their history 
 since the year 1800. The man represents the 
 average labourer. The weight he is grasping 
 represents the amount of work which the 
 average labourer could do at the beginning of 
 this century. The larger weights represent the 
 constantly increasing amount of work which 
 he has since become able to do, through the 
 powers lent to him by the ability of others ; 
 and the flag standing by each of the weights 
 indicates the average wages of such a labourer 
 at the various periods mentioned. The 
 condition of the wage-earners is illustrated 
 yet further by Fig. 9, which embodies the 
 results of Mr. Giff'en's latest investigations. 
 The column represents the proportions of the 
 working classes in receipt of annual wages of 
 the amounts stated.
 
 32 HOW IS WEALTH DISTRIBUTING ITSELF f 
 
 ^96. 
 
 jf 67. 
 
 It is idle for philanthropists, true or false — 
 for those who sympathise with want and 
 sorrow, or who affect sympathy — 
 to attempt to disprove these facts 
 by citing the cases of misery to be 
 found in every town in the king- 
 dom. London alone possesses an 
 unfortunate class, which is probably 
 as large as the whole population of 
 Glasgow, and an endless proces- 
 sion of rags and tatters miofht be 
 marched into Hyde Park to demon- 
 strate every Sunday. But if the 
 unfortunate class in London is as 
 large as the whole population of 
 Glasgow, we must not forget that 
 the population of London is greater 
 by nearly a million than the whole 
 population of Scotland ; and the 
 great practical lesson which requires 
 to be instilled into social reformers 
 is that the tendencies of a civilisation 
 must be studied in its effects for 
 good on nine-tenths of the popula- 
 tion, rather than in the absence 
 
 Fig. 9. 
 
 of any such effects upon one-tenth ; and that
 
 HOW IS WEALTH DISTRIBUTING ITSELF? 33 
 
 the real problem to be solved is not how to 
 alter these tendencies, but to bring those under 
 their influence who have hitherto remained 
 outside it. To attempt to interfere with the 
 progress of the nine -tenths because the one- 
 tenth has not hitherto shared it, would be 
 like attempting to wreck a great steamer with 
 six hundred passengers merely because sixty of 
 them had bad accommodation in the steerage.
 
 CHAPTER II 
 
 THE MINIMUM OF HUMANE LIVING 
 
 Baying now seen the way in which wealth is 
 tending to distribute itself, and how, in spite of 
 all the phenomena of chronic poverty and 
 periods of occasional distress, the working 
 classes as a whole are constant gainers by the 
 natural economic processes which are at work 
 around us, and how the multiplication of large 
 incomes is accompanied by a general rise in 
 wages, let us pass on to consider the most 
 recent doctrine of the modern labour party 
 with regard to the means by which wages may 
 be increased yet further — that is to say, the 
 doctrine of the minimum wage, or, as it is 
 now called, the " living wage." 
 
 In certain countries, and notably in Russia, 
 the wages in factories are so low, and the hours 
 of labour so long, that the commiseration of 
 every Englishman, of whatever class, would be
 
 THE MINIMUM OF HUMANE LIVING 35 
 
 excited for the fate of operatives employed on 
 such hard terms ; and when we consider their 
 case, and compare it with that of others in 
 other countries, the conclusion becomes obvious 
 to us that by some means or other — by the 
 action of public opinion, or by raising the 
 standard of living — it is possible so to increase 
 the minimum rate of wages, and at the same 
 time to decrease the maximum duration of the 
 labour day, as to place the worst-paid operative 
 in a better position than that at present occupied 
 by his fellows generally in Russia. 
 
 We may therefore say that, within certain 
 limits, and with certain reservations, the 
 doctrine of the "living wage" embodies an 
 important and practical truth. The only ques- 
 tion at issue is. How, under any given circum- 
 stances, is the amount of the living wage to be 
 determined ? What is the annual sum, and what 
 is the general condition as to food, clothing, 
 house -accommodation, and so forth, below 
 which it is reasonable and practicable to attempt 
 to prevent the wages and general condition of 
 the poorest classes of workmen from falling ? 
 
 The urgent and definite character of this 
 problem was brought home to this country in
 
 36 THE MINIMUM OF HUMANE LIVING 
 
 a very remarkable manner by the great coal- 
 strike of a few years ago, in connection with 
 which the doctrine of the living wage first came 
 into prominence. The colliers, it will be re- 
 membered, struck against a certain reduction 
 in their wages on various grounds, but on 
 the following ground in particular — that it 
 would not leave them enough to support them 
 in what their leaders had taught them to call 
 " a humane condition." It was not denied 
 that it would leave them better off than their 
 fathers had been, or than they themselves had 
 been till a comparatively recent period. But 
 according to their leaders this did not alter 
 the question. A number of doctrinaires all 
 over the country — some of them professional 
 agitators, some of them emotional clergymen — 
 began preaching the doctrine that " a humane 
 condition" for a collier comprised all the comforts 
 and superfluities which the colliers, as a class, 
 had enjoyed during the period of their greatest 
 prosperity ; and this condition was put forward 
 as the irreducible minimum of wellbeing, below 
 which, if a collier sank, he was being defrauded 
 of his rights as a man. 
 
 Now, was this way of putting the case a true
 
 THE MINIMUM OF HUMANE LIVING 37 
 
 way or a false way ? Was it in harmony 
 with reason, and based on any principle capable 
 of general application ? Were the colliers who 
 followed their leaders' teachings, and refused 
 to accept the proposed reduction of wages, on 
 the ground that it would deprive them of the 
 means of leading *' a humane life," acting as 
 foolish and misguided men, recklessly unwill- 
 ing to take the rough of life with the smooth ? 
 or were they fighting, as their leaders main- 
 tained they were, to prevent themselves and 
 their families from sinking into a want and 
 squalor that would be a disgrace to civilisation? 
 The real question that is here involved, 
 though the great coal-strike brought it specially 
 to the front, is involved equally in all our con- 
 temporary labour struggles, and in all our 
 views and sentiments as to the condition of the 
 great majority of the community, What is the 
 standard by which we measure " a humane con- 
 dition " ? That is to say, what is the smallest 
 income that will keep a human being and his 
 family in such a condition that we can regard 
 their existence with complaisance, that we can 
 feel it to be a happiness to themselves and a 
 benefit to the community, and any pity or
 
 38 THE MINIMUM OF 111- MANE LIVING 
 
 complaint with regard to it to be entirely out 
 of place ? 
 
 About this question not only is the vaguest 
 and most irrational language used by many 
 people, but the vaguest ideas prevail, and the 
 most irrational sentimentality is cherished. 
 The persons who sin most in this way are 
 generally persons belonging to the richer and 
 more educated classes. These persons are 
 accustomed to speak of the vast majority of 
 mankind as deserving commiseration simply 
 because they are obliged to lead that life of 
 muscular labour which, under many conditions, 
 is the necessary lot of all, and from which, 
 under any conditions, only a minority can be 
 exempt, and because they do not enjoy a 
 number of luxuries and advantages which, 
 from the very nature of the case, a minority 
 only can possess. Some people, for instance, 
 speak as if everybody was to be commiserated 
 who did not possess servants. Now, a state 
 is quite conceivable in which nobody possessed 
 them ; but it is obviously impossible, from the 
 very nature of things, that in any state they 
 should be possessed by more than a comparative 
 few. What, then, can be more foolish and
 
 THE MINIMUM OF HUMANE LIVING 39 
 
 mischievous than to popularise standards of 
 living which must, under any social arrange- 
 ments possible, be necessarily out of the reach 
 of the majority of those who aim at them ? 
 So, again, with regard to the question of 
 labour : what is more common than the same 
 commiserating tone applied to men because 
 they have to dig, plough, fish, and be out in 
 all weathers ? How often are we invited to 
 endeavour to alleviate their " hard lot " — to 
 think of their " hard life " ! Can any kind of 
 sentiment be falser and more demoralising 
 than this ? It is based on the idea that the 
 life of luxury is the rule, and the life of toil 
 and exposure the exception. But everybody 
 who thinks can see that the exact reverse is 
 the case, and that toil and exposure not only 
 are, but always have been, and always must 
 be, the common, the typical human lot. And 
 this was so before luxury ever existed, and it 
 would be so still were all luxury abolished. 
 It is idle to turn, as some people do, to the 
 luxurious classes, and ask them what they 
 would say if this life of toil were to be theirs ? 
 Many, no doubt, would whimper and bemoan 
 themselves ; others would bear the change
 
 40 THE MINIMUM OF HUMANE LIVING 
 
 \vith fortitude. But what the luxurious 
 classes might do, or say, or think, in such an 
 event has nothing to do with the matter. 
 They would not alter the common lot by 
 sharing it ; and to say that daily toil is hard, 
 and that exposure to weather is hard, is merely 
 another way of saying that human life is hard. 
 It may be hard if men choose to think it so ; 
 but by thinking it hard they only make it 
 harder. Durum, sed leviusfit patientid. 
 
 The lot, then, that is commonly called the 
 lot of the poor is not, as such, a fit subject of 
 any commiseration. It is the normal type of 
 human life ; and those foolish persons who 
 treat it as if it were not so would do well to 
 read w^hat was said upon this subject by 
 Cobbett — himself a son of the toiling classes 
 — in his excellent little book, Cottage 
 Economy. But these general considerations, 
 in order to make them useful, require to be 
 reduced to a more particular form. Though 
 much that is called poverty deserves no com- 
 miseration, and though it is at once mis- 
 chievous and cruel to attempt to make the 
 mass of men discontented with it, yet poverty 
 is a thing of many degrees ; and there are
 
 THE MINIMUM OF HUMANE LIVING 41 
 
 degrees of it to which every Christian, every 
 philanthropist, every statesman, will do his 
 utmost to prevent any class falling. There is 
 a certain minimum degree of wellbeing which 
 it should be the main object of all statesman- 
 ship to secure ; and it is impossible to insist 
 on this fact too often, too publicly, or with 
 too great and earnest emphasis. But the 
 practical question is all a question of degree. 
 What is this minimum standard of comfort 
 and humane living, up to which we can hope 
 to raise everybody, and below which we 
 should endeavour to prevent any man's wages 
 sinking ? What does it depend upon ? 
 
 One thing may be said at once — that it 
 does not depend on what well-to-do philan- 
 thropists might think desirable ; for it is 
 limited at all events by one hard external 
 circumstance, namely, the amount of income 
 which would go to each family were the whole 
 income, of whatever nation may be in question, 
 divided equally amongst everybody. The 
 minimum of humane living cannot possibly be 
 more than that. But not only is the income 
 of the same nation different at one period 
 from what it is at another, but the incomes of
 
 42 THE MINIMUM OF HUMANE LIVING 
 
 different nations differ widely from each other 
 at the same })eriod. Thus the average income 
 per head of the United Kingdom to-day is 
 nearly three times that of Italy. Accordingly 
 a pliilanthropist who was anxious to raise tlie 
 minimum standard as high as possible all over 
 Europe could not by any possibility raise it in 
 Italy to much more than one-third of the 
 height to which he could raise it in this 
 country. The illustration on the opposite page 
 wiU assist the reader in realising this important 
 point. The houses of various sizes are in pro- 
 portion to the respective amounts per head 
 that could be yielded in each country by an 
 equal division of its entire income. Suppose, 
 then, we were to fix " the minimum standard 
 of humane living " for a man in this country 
 as the maximum that would come to every- 
 body from an equal distribution of everything, 
 we should be forced with regard to other 
 European nations to conclude that it is im- 
 possible for them as nations to lead a humane 
 existence at all ; or else we must be prepared 
 to say that a standard of living is quite fit for 
 a man in Italy or Kussia or Austria that 
 would not be fit for a pig in England. We
 
 ITALY. 
 
 RUSSIA.
 
 44 THE MINIMUM OF HUMANE LIVING 
 
 will, liowever, for the present waive this point, 
 and confininfr our attention to our own 
 country and the obvious limits placed on the 
 standard of "humane living" by the limita- 
 tion of the total income of the country, let us 
 consider if it is not true that within these 
 limits the standard of living depends on the 
 habits and requirements which can be 
 developed amongst the great masses of the 
 people. Does it not depend on what certain 
 clergymen, who affect the name of Christian 
 Socialists, call " the divine discontent " of the 
 people with their existing conditions ? And 
 may not the people in the long run be able to 
 demand and get whatever, within the limits 
 just specified, they can be taught to expect 
 and want ? 
 
 The answer to this question is as follows : — 
 The standard of living does depend to a certain 
 degree on the habits and requirements of the 
 great masses of the people, and can to a 
 certain degree be raised by educating their 
 habits and amplifying their requirements. A 
 population content with squalor and one- 
 roomed cabins will no doubt demand and 
 command less wages than a population to
 
 THE MINIMUM OF HUMANE LIVING 45 
 
 which the primary decencies of life are a 
 necessity ; and by educating men to be dis- 
 gusted with indecency and filth, the minimum 
 standard of humane living can be raised, and 
 the wages of these men can be increased. 
 But the progress that can be brought about 
 in this way is progress that can be carried to 
 a certain degree only ; and this is a degree 
 that not only falls far short of the limit fixed 
 by the limits of the national income, but 
 depends on, and is fixed by, a totally difierent 
 order of facts. My object in this chapter is 
 to explain in the clearest way possible what 
 these facts are. It will be seen, when once 
 we have grasped them, that they give us 
 a " standard of humane living " which has 
 nothing to do with personal sentiment or 
 opinion, with the prejudices of Tories or 
 the " aspirations " of Socialists, but is deter- 
 mined by forces and conditions which are the 
 same for every school, and which no political 
 reformer could even pretend that he will be 
 able to modify. 
 
 The " minimum standard of humane living " 
 is determined, and is necessarily determined, 
 by the maximum which a man who pays no
 
 46 THE MINIMUM OF HUMANE LIVING 
 
 rent can extract hij his own lahour from the 
 worst soil under cultivation. To persons un- 
 accustomed to economic reasoning this state- 
 ment may sound like academic jarov^n. I wish 
 to show them that its meaning is of the 
 simplest and of the homeliest kind, and that 
 the most ordinary man or woman is as capable 
 of giving an intelligent assent to it as the 
 most unkempt and most untidy professor who 
 ever held forth in a lecture-room. 
 
 Let us beo^in then with reminding; ourselves 
 of a few truisms. All life depends on food ; 
 nearly all our food comes from the soil ; and 
 therefore we could none of us live unless the 
 soil were cultivated. In other words, no 
 nation could exist if it were not for the 
 existence of a class of cultivators somewhere. 
 Men tilling the soil, therefore, must always be 
 a social necessity ; and it is impossible to con- 
 ceive of any human society of which they do not 
 form a prominent and essential part. Now let 
 us, for simplicity's sake, accept the view of the 
 Socialists that a capitalistic and employing class 
 is a superfluity in agriculture ; let us suppose 
 that small owners, who employ nobody but 
 themselves, and each of whom owns just as
 
 THE MINIMUM OF HUMANE LIVING 47 
 
 much land as lie can himself cultivate, and no 
 more, are capable of extracting the maximum 
 produce from the soil, and that men of this 
 class between them cultivate the entire country. 
 Now let the reader consider what will be the 
 situation of these men. It is obvious that 
 they are men forming a necessary class, and 
 enjoying the maximum degree of comfort that 
 they could by any possibility attain, for they 
 extract from the soil the utmost it can be 
 made to yield ; and everything which it yields 
 is their own property, which they either 
 actually consume themselves, or sell for their 
 own benefit. Let us take, for instance, any 
 one of these men and consider his case. The 
 acres which he, or he and his family between 
 them, own and cultivate yield, we will say, 
 produce to the annual value of £100. Unless 
 this man become a capitalistic employer of 
 other men — a supposition which we are now 
 expressly excluding — his income of £100 
 could not possibly be increased by so much as 
 a single sixpence, except through the charity 
 of the rest of the community. It could be 
 raised to £105 only by the rest of the com- 
 munity giving him £5. In that case he would
 
 4S THE mMINLMUM OF HUMANE LIVING 
 
 be yearly cousiimiug so much more than lie 
 produced, and consequently his existence 
 would be a disadvantage, a useless expense, 
 a burden to all other classes. Now the exist- 
 ence of an individual of this kind might 
 be tolerated ; but the existence of a great 
 productive class, thus dependent on other 
 classes, not only could not be tolerated, but 
 would be impossible. Every great productive 
 class must be self-supporting. It must, to 
 say the least, produce as much as it consumes, 
 or, in other words, it must not consume more 
 than it produces, or, in other words again, its 
 standard of humane living must not exceed 
 the value of its gross products. If the value 
 of the gross products will not support the 
 producers as human beings they ought to be 
 set to produce something else. Thus, if the 
 value of the gross agricultural products of this 
 country would not be sufficient, supposing 
 the whole of it were divided amongst the 
 labourers, to support them in a state fit for 
 human beings, the agriculture of this country 
 ought to be extinguished, and we ought to get 
 all our food from some other region ; but if, 
 on the other hand, we believe, what no sane
 
 THE MINIMUM OF HUMANE LIVING 49 
 
 person doubts, that the soil of this country 
 ought to be cultivated, and ought not 
 to become a desert, we must necessarily 
 believe that the value of its gross products is, 
 supposing that the labourers get the whole of 
 it, at least sufficient to support them in a 
 humane condition — a condition in which they 
 are not objects of pity, and with which it 
 would be folly and madness to attempt to 
 make them discontented. Let us then put 
 our minimum of humane living as high as we 
 can, we cannot put it higher than the value 
 of the entire products which agriculture yields 
 the agriculturist who works his own soil, or a 
 soil for which he pays no rent, with his own 
 hands ; and the value of these products will at 
 once give us this highest minimum in pounds, 
 shillings, and pence. 
 
 Now, however, we must consider another 
 point. We have been speaking of the soil of 
 this country, and a class of cultivators each 
 owning just so much of it as he can cultivate. 
 The reader knows, of course, even if he knows 
 nothing of agriculture, that all soils are not 
 equally good ; but of the degree of difference 
 between their qualities and the amount there
 
 THE MINIMUM OF HUMANE LIVING 
 
 is of land of ciu^li (juality he probably has 
 
 n-: au exceedingly dim 
 idea. Let him turn 
 then to the accom- 
 panying diagram. 
 It will give him a 
 rough, but substan- 
 tially accurate, idea 
 of how the goodness 
 of the soil in this 
 _ country varies, and 
 the proportion be- 
 ^^ tween the area of 
 the best soils and 
 the poorer. The 
 entire oblong figure 
 represents the whole 
 cultivated area of 
 the United King- 
 dom. The shaded 
 portions represent 
 the value of the soil 
 as indicated by the 
 "^ rent paid for it, and 
 "^ the entire spaces be- 
 tween the various points marked A represent the
 
 THE MINIMUM OF HUMANE LIVING 51 
 
 proportionate amounts of soils of each quality. 
 Thus the best land — the land whose produce per 
 acre fetches the largest price (such as dairy land 
 and market-garden land near towns), and the 
 rental of which, sometimes as high as £12, 
 
 averages £5 : 12s. — forms hardly so much as 
 one twenty- sixth of the country. Land of 
 quality 2 forms not so much as one -sixth, 
 whilst land of quality 4 and of qualities yet in- 
 ferior, forms, roughly speaking, one-half of the 
 cultivated surface of Great Britain and Ireland. 
 Now, what is the meaning of this fact as 
 related to our present inquiry ? Its meaning
 
 52 THE MINIMUM OF HUMANE LIVING 
 
 is this : that if the agriculturists of this country 
 were a body each member of which owned as 
 much soil as he himself could cultivate, and, 
 appropriating in this way the full value of the 
 products, were to enjoy (as we have seen he 
 would do) the maximum income possible for a 
 self-supporting cultivator, the incomes of one- 
 half of the agriculturists of this kingdom 
 would be less than half the incomes of the 
 other half, and the incomes of one - tenth 
 would be less than a fifth of the incomes of 
 another tenth. A parent, for instance, has a 
 son called Tommy, destined to be an agri- 
 culturist and capable of cultivating twelve 
 acres. ^ Tommy's income will depend on the 
 quality of the twelve acres allotted to him. 
 Let us represent his income by the proportions 
 of his figure, and we shall see that if he has 
 twelve acres of quality 1 he will be the rotund 
 personage marked A, in the drawing on the 
 preceding page, whereas if his acres are of one 
 of those poorer qualities which together make 
 
 ^ Whei'e certain inferior soils are in question, the area would 
 have to be more than twelve acres, for the unit is really determined 
 by the area which one man can cultivate to the best advantage ; 
 but there are many soils of widely different productivity, which 
 would require per acre the same amount of labour.
 
 LAND OF QUALITY 1. 
 
 LAND OF QUALITY 2. 
 
 LAND OF QUALITY 3. 
 
 LAND OF QUALITIES 4 AND 5. LAND OF QUALITIES 6, 7, 8, 9, and 10.
 
 54 THE MINIMUM OF HUMANE LIVING 
 
 up an entire half of the United Kingdom, he 
 will not bulk larger in our sight than the 
 portrait of him marked B. 
 
 And now let us employ this same method 
 of illustration further. Let us suppose, as 
 before, the whole of our agricultural popula- 
 tion to consist of cultivators each owning as 
 much soil as he can cultivate ; and let us re- 
 present them, according to their incomes, as 
 Tommies of various sizes. The result will be 
 substantially that which is shown in the 
 series of pictures on p. 53. For every two 
 Tommies such as those who cultivate and 
 grow fat on land of quality 1, we shall have 
 nine less fat cultivating land of quality 2 ; we 
 shall have eighteen less fat still on land of 
 quality 3, and twenty-four of varying degrees 
 of meagreness on land of qualities 4, 5, 6, 7, 
 8, 9, and 10. 
 
 The reader will now see the meaning of the 
 statement that the minim um standard of humane 
 living cannot by any possibility be made to 
 exceed the value of the produce which a man 
 who pays no rent can exact by his oivn labour 
 from the tvorst soil under cultivation. This 
 principle does not in the least conflict with the
 
 THE MINIMUM OF HUMANE LIVING 55 
 
 doctrine that the condition of the labouring 
 class can be improved by raising their standard 
 of living. We must, on the contrary, take it 
 in connection with this doctrine, and see the 
 consequences that follow. Let us turn, then, 
 to the figures in our picture who represent the 
 cultivators of the worst land cultivated — land 
 of qualities 6, 7, 8, 9, and 10, the rental of 
 which varies from nine shillings to a shilling 
 an acre ; and let us suppose we decide that 
 their incomes are too small for their comfort, 
 their health, their happiness — in a word, for 
 "humane living." How can these men's 
 standard of living be raised? They already 
 take and consume every penny they produce 
 by their utmost skill and exertion. How are 
 we to add to their incomes ? We can do this 
 in one way only : by taking them off the poor 
 soil they occupy and finding for them some 
 more lucrative occupation. But in doing this 
 what should we be doing ? AVe could not 
 transfer them to any more productive soils, 
 because, ex hypotliesi, all the more productive 
 soils are already occupied. We should, there- 
 fore, whatever other occupation we found for 
 them, be declaring in the most emphatic way
 
 56 THE MINIMUM OF HUMANE LIVING 
 
 imaginable that such and such a proportion of 
 the cultivated soil of this kinsfdom ouo^ht to 
 be cultivated no longer by anybody, but 
 allowed forthwith to relapse into a state of 
 wilderness ; for we should be declaring that it 
 could not by any possible means support its 
 cultivators in a condition fit for human beings. 
 AVe may therefore, if we like, raise our standard 
 of humane living as far as the limits of the 
 national income will permit ; but we must 
 remember that the moment it exceeds the 
 standard supplied by the gross incomes derived 
 from the worst soil cultivated we are condemn- 
 ing such soil to go out of cultivation altogether. 
 Let us see how this would work out. The 
 average yearly value of the total agTicultural pro- 
 ducts of this kingdom is about £220,000,000 ; 
 the total cultivated area is about 70,000,000 
 acres ; thus the total produce per acre averages 
 about .£3. The average rental for the whole 
 kingdom is under £1 an acre. We are there- 
 fore safe in saying that a man who cultivates 
 the kind of land that lets now for £1 an acre 
 will not produce per acre more than £3. Let 
 us assume — this is merely an assumption — that 
 he can cultivate sixteen acres. In that case
 
 THE MINIMUM OF HUMANE LIVING 57 
 
 his income will be £48. And now let us sup- 
 pose that some friend to labour endeavours 
 to benefit his kind by raising the standard of 
 living, and persuading the labouring classes 
 that a life fit for a self-respecting man cannot 
 be supported on £48 a year. This will mean 
 that at least one-half of the soil of the United 
 Kingdom ought to go out of cultivation. The 
 whole of the figures in the bottom row of our 
 picture ought to be swept at once out of the 
 ranks of agriculturists. We need only raise 
 our standard a little higher, and we shall have 
 to sweep away likewise the row of figures 
 given above them. Then we should have to 
 cease, because the incomes of the men cultivat- 
 ing soils of the first and second qualities would 
 be more than the sums that could come to 
 them from an equal division of the entire 
 income of the nation ; but if we were only to 
 raise our standard thus far, we should, as the 
 reader will see by referring to the oblong 
 diagram on p. 50, be declaring that three- 
 quarters of the national soil was incapable of 
 supporting its cultivators, and ought to be 
 allowed to return to a state of nature. 
 
 Will anybody be silly enough to make such
 
 SS THE MINIMUM OF HUMANE LIVING 
 
 a proposition as that ? We may safely say 
 that nobody will ; or if any one did, certainly 
 no one would listen to him. Will anybody 
 say that so much as half the soil of the king- 
 dom should be allowed to go out of cultiva- 
 tion ? There is just as little chance of any- 
 body's saying that. Indeed, when we consider 
 that some of the bitterest attacks on the 
 existing landed class have been made in conse- 
 quence of the removal of agricultural popula- 
 tions from land in Scotland and elsewhere the 
 rent of which was under five shillings an acre, 
 we may say that practically there is no one, of 
 whatever party, who maintains that any con- 
 siderable portion of even the poorest land in 
 this country should be allowed to go out of 
 cultivation. There is therefore an implied 
 agreement between all parties, whether all 
 parties are aware of the fact or no, that the 
 poorest of our cultivated soils, if only they 
 were rent-free, would yield to each of their 
 cultivators produce of sufficient value to sup- 
 port him in a *' humane condition," a condition, 
 moreover, which could not be improved unless 
 he abandoned the soil in question, and with 
 which therefore he ought to be contented.
 
 THE MINIMUM OF HUMANE LIVING 59 
 
 It is not proposed here to suggest any 
 precise figure as that of the minimum income 
 which ought to content the cultivator. It 
 may be observed, however, that much of the 
 poorest land of this country bears so low a 
 rental as to be very nearly rentless already, 
 and is already cultivated by peasant holders. 
 Thus, if we were to turn these men into owners 
 and let them keep their rent themselves, their 
 incomes would be somewhat, but not greatly, 
 increased. If therefore we wish to keep these 
 men in their holdings, to attach them to the 
 soil, and to perpetuate them as a class, we are, 
 consciously or unconsciously, afiirming that 
 the incomes which they enjoy at present are 
 sufficient, or are within a fraction of being 
 sufficient, to support a life not only fit for a 
 human being, but a life which we can feel 
 satisfaction in thinking; that human beinsjs lead. 
 We thus arrive at a definite objective standard, 
 entirely independent of sentimental opinion or 
 class feeling, by which to fix the minimum of 
 humane living. 
 
 In all industrial disputes, then, when any 
 question arises as to the attitude of labourers 
 in resisting a reduction of wages, the public
 
 6o THE MINIMUM OF HUMANE LIVING 
 
 and tlie men themselves, and especially their 
 leaders who have theories, will do well to refer 
 to the standard of a sufficient income supplied 
 hy the utmost income that can be earned by 
 this class of cultivators — an income which half 
 the agitators in the country have been virtu- 
 ally declaring to be sufficient by denouncing 
 those who would drive these men off the soil. 
 That a large portion of the labouring class may 
 raise itself to indefinitely greater opulence is 
 not denied for a moment. It has indeed 
 ah'eady done so, as was shown, in the first 
 chapter of this volume ; and there is hope that 
 in the future it may raise itself still farther. 
 There is hope also that even the cultivators of 
 the poorest soils may, with improvements in 
 industrial methods, earn larger incomes. It 
 must further be borne in mind that the cost 
 of living varies in different localities, and also 
 the kind and quality of food required by men 
 in different occupations : therefore the living 
 wage of a Highland crofter, for instance, would 
 not be a living wage for an operative in a 
 manufacturing town. But these considerations 
 do not affect the general principle that has 
 been just explained, namely, that the mini-
 
 THE MINLMUM OF HUMANE LIVING 6i 
 
 mum standard of decent, or *' humane " living, 
 in any given country, and any given state of 
 civilisation, cannot be generally far removed 
 from the standard supplied by the living of 
 that part of the population, who, in accordance 
 with their own wishes, and with the sanction 
 of the rest of the community, occupy the 
 poorest soils under cultivation, and paying 
 either no rent, or merely a nominal rent for 
 them, consume the whole, or virtually the 
 whole of the product. 
 
 We will now proceed to consider a yet wider 
 question than the above, namely, a set of 
 conditions inherent in every society, socialistic 
 or individualistic, wherein division of labour 
 prevails, by which all wages, whether sufficient 
 or insufficient, are limited.
 
 CHAPTER 111 
 
 WAGES AND THE PRODUCTS OF WORK 
 
 Mr. Bright once said that the secret of con- 
 vincing oratory was to say one thing, and say 
 it over and over again. Let us so far be 
 guided by him as to say over again, in general 
 terms, the gist of what has been said akeady 
 with regard to the living wage ; for we shall 
 find that that subject connects itself very 
 closely with the wider one on which we shall 
 presently be entering. 
 
 We have just seen that if we took the same 
 labourer, and settled him, during successive 
 years, on soils of difi'erent quality, that his 
 income, cceteris paribus, would each year be 
 difi'erent. Let us then fix our attention on 
 the smallest of these incomes, namely, that 
 which he would derive from the poorest of the 
 soils allotted him. We will suppose this to be 
 such soil as in certain parts of the country is
 
 WAGES AND THE PRODUCTS OF WORK 63 
 
 now let at something like a shilling an acre. 
 The man's rent, whatever it comes to, is really 
 part of the produce of the soil rented. We 
 will accordingly represent the total produce by 
 the oblong figure A. In the case of soils like 
 these, which are just on the margin of cultiva- 
 tion, a very small proportion of the 
 produce is paid away in rent, the 
 larger part being necessary for the 
 bare support of the cultivator. The 
 man's rent, therefore, will be in- 
 dicated with substantial accuracy 
 by the small shaded portion at the 
 top of Fig. 1. Now, it is evident that if 
 this man is to earn his own living on the 
 soil in question, his total income cannot pos- 
 sibly be increased — the general condition of 
 the industrial arts remaining the same — ex- 
 cept by remitting his rent to him, or giving 
 him the soil for his own ; and, in this case, 
 his income will be increased by the amount 
 indicated by the shaded portion of the 
 figure, but it cannot by any possibility be in- 
 creased farther. If, then, the public is con- 
 tented that such soil should be cultivated at 
 all, the public virtually aflirms that the cul- 
 
 FlG. 1.
 
 64 WAGES AND THE PRODUCTS OF WORK 
 
 tivator should be contented with such a life as 
 can be supported by the consumption or sale 
 of the total produce which it yields to him. 
 
 To render this point and its significance yet 
 more clear, let us take our paral- y 
 
 lelogram A, in Fig. 1, which repre- 
 sents the cultivator's in- 
 come on the poorest soil, 
 and place it, as in Fig. 
 2, beside cor- 
 
 FiG. 2. 
 
 parallelograms, which will represent his income 
 on superior soils. The entire parallelogram 
 A, w^e must remember, including the shaded 
 portion, represents at once the total pro- 
 duce of the soil in question, and also an 
 income on which a man can support a life 
 with which, in the judgment of his coutem-
 
 WAGES AND THE PRODUCTS OF WORK 65 
 
 poraries, he ought to be contented. If the 
 parallelogram A, then, represents the total 
 which the man can produce from the poorest 
 soil, the total which by similar labour he can 
 extract from superior soil will be represented 
 by the parallelograms B, C, and D. Now let 
 us suppose that at starting the cultivator of the 
 poorest soil pays away in rent the portion of his 
 produce represented by the shaded portion of 
 the parallelogram A, and that then some 
 measure of land-reform frees him from this pay- 
 ment, and makes his holding practically his 
 own, on the ground that thus he is able to lead 
 a humane life, and that otherwise he would not 
 be able. The sole result of such legislation on 
 other and better land would not be to free it of 
 rent likewise, but only to reduce the rent of it 
 by the precise amount paid for the poorest hold- 
 ing. For instance, to free land, which is now 
 rented at two shillings an acre, of all rent, 
 would be merely to reduce land that now lets at 
 five guineas an acre to a rental of five pounds 
 three shillings. How this is can be seen easily 
 from the diagram. The dotted line i i repre- 
 sents a minimum living income. Let the dark 
 horizontal line I r represent the measure of land- 
 
 5
 
 66 WAGES AND THE PRODUCTS OF WORK 
 
 reform by which the cultivator of the poorest 
 soil is allowed to retain the whole of his rent. 
 The same line, when it crosses the other 
 figures, merely cuts off a small fraction of the 
 portions which represent their original rents ; 
 and it cannot possibly do more. If the culti- 
 vator of the poorest soil will obtain a living 
 income by adding to his original income the 
 shaded portion of A, it cannot be maintained 
 that the cultivators of the superior soils will not 
 be able to support a humane existence unless 
 we make over to them the whole of the shaded 
 portion of B, C, and D. We can soon see this 
 by taking the cultivator of the best soil, and 
 trying to apply to his case the reasoning that 
 was applied to that of the cultivator of the 
 worst. The total value of his products is re- 
 presented by the parallelogram D. If we say 
 of him that he cannot support a humane exist- 
 ence unless he has the whole of the shaded 
 portion added to his original income, we shall 
 be saying that a living income, or the minimum 
 wage, is represented not by the line i i, but by 
 the line // In that case it would follow that 
 the inferior soils could not be cultivated at all, 
 because their total produce would, as has been
 
 WAGES AND THE PRODUCTS OF WORK 67 
 
 said already, be insufficient to yield a living 
 income to their cultivators. But since we 
 assume that in the judgment of the entire 
 nation the inferior soils still ought to be culti- 
 vated, the living income must necessarily be 
 limited by the total product which results 
 from a man's labour when applied not to the 
 best soil cultivated, but to the worst. 
 
 Let us, then, continue to fix our attention 
 on this minimum living income of the 
 cultivator of the poorest soil, and ask our- 
 selves the following question with regard to 
 it : Is it a minimum which there is no hope 
 of increasing? And does the cultivator of 
 the poorest soil stand accordingly outside the 
 ranks of progress ? If we take the working 
 men of this country as a whole, the increase 
 of their average incomes has, during the past 
 hundred years, been constant and almost in- 
 credible. Has the cultivator of the poorest 
 soil had no share in this increase ? Is his 
 position no better than it was a hundred 
 years ago ? And is there no hope that fifty 
 years hence it may be better than it is now ? 
 The answer to these questions is that his 
 position during the past hundred years has
 
 68 ll'AGES AND THE PRODUCTS OF WORK 
 
 become better, and may continue to grow 
 
 l)ctter still ; and 
 
 in two ways. The 
 first way is obvi- 
 ous, namely, by 
 the discovery of 
 improved meth- 
 ods of agriculture, 
 which will enable 
 him with the 
 same labour to 
 extract more pro- 
 duce from the 
 soil. The second 
 way is altogether 
 different. It is 
 by an increase, 
 not in the amount 
 of his products, 
 but in their 
 selling price or 
 their exchange- 
 able value. Of 
 the first way I 
 do not propose 
 to speak. I am going to deal solely with the
 
 WAGES AND THE PRODUCTS OF WORK 69 
 
 second ; and if I can make the reader clearly 
 understand that, I shall have made him 
 understand the real truth of the question 
 which is at the bottom of nearly all the 
 labour disputes which are now impeding 
 industry. 
 
 As every one knows, the most rudimentary 
 form of progress has been some simple division 
 of labour. Instead of each man producing 
 everything that he himself needs, different 
 sets of men devote themselves to producing 
 severally some one kind of commodity which 
 they all need. Instead of each man producing 
 his own bread, his own coats, and his own 
 furniture, one man tills the soil and produces 
 bread for three, another sews and produces 
 clothes for three, another works as a carpenter 
 and produces stools and tables for three. 
 Now, if each man produced all that he wanted 
 for himself, the measure of his income would 
 be the amount of the things produced by him ; 
 but the moment this arrangement ceases, and 
 its place is taken by a division of labour, his 
 position in this respect altogether changes, and 
 the measure of his income is not the amount 
 or even the quality of the things produced
 
 70 WAGES AND THE PRODUCTS OF WORK 
 
 Bread 
 consumed 
 by James 
 himself. 
 
 by him, but the amount and quality of the 
 other things which he can get in exchange for 
 them. It is no doubt true that where industry 
 
 is in a very rude stage 
 and only necessaries are 
 produced, each man will 
 keep and consume part 
 of his own produce. 
 But this is not an essen- 
 tial feature in the case. 
 Even in a very rude 
 community we can easily 
 imagine a man who 
 never smoked getting 
 his living by the manu- 
 facture of tobacco. We 
 will, however, in order 
 to make our argument clearer, not give this 
 fact a place in it. 
 
 Let us then imagine a community of three 
 men, each living in a house, which we will 
 assume to be provided for him, and wanting 
 nothing but food, clothes, and furniture. One 
 man cultivates the soil, raises corn, and makes 
 bread ; another makes clothes out of the skins 
 
 Fig. 4. — Income of James under 
 Condition No. 1. 
 
 of wild animals wdiich he catches ; a third fells
 
 WAGES AND THE PRODUCTS OF WORK 71 
 
 timber, and makes chairs, tables, and other 
 utensils. We will call these men James, 
 George, and Joseph ; and Fig. 3, p. 68, 
 which represents each of them, with the 
 results of a day's labour in the corner — in one 
 case three loaves, in another the sleeve of a 
 shirt, and in another a three-legged stool — 
 will help to impress them on the imagination 
 of the reader. We will begin with considering 
 the position of James, the cultivator and 
 bread-producer. He produces, we will say, 
 by the utmost expenditure of his labour, three 
 loaves a day, every loaf representing a man's 
 daily consumption. It is impossible for him, 
 by any method of agriculture with which he 
 is acquainted, to obtain more loaves from any 
 soil accessible to him ; therefore, so far as the 
 quantity of his produce is concerned, he has 
 no hope of increasing it, nor in respect of the 
 loaves which he consumes himself is there any 
 possibility of his position being changed at 
 all. These loaves, however, form but one-third 
 of his income. The remainder consists of 
 loaves for which he has no use himself, but 
 which happen to be necessary to the existence 
 of George and Joseph ; he therefore gives a
 
 72 WAGES AND THE PRODUCTS OF WORK 
 
 Bread 
 consumed 
 by James 
 himself. 
 
 loaf daily to each of these men, and they 
 return him an equivalent in clothes and house- 
 hold goods. James's income, therefore — or the 
 amount of goods which he can secure for 
 
 himself by his 
 own labour — 
 depends prin- 
 cipally not on 
 what his own 
 products are, 
 but on what 
 the products 
 of George and 
 Joseph are, and 
 on how much 
 of these they 
 will each give 
 him in return for a daily loaf. Now, 
 when men like these are working for the 
 barest necessaries and the rudest comforts of 
 existence, and all presumably work equally 
 hard and well, their products will exchange in 
 proportion to the time employed in producing 
 them. Thus each loaf produced daily by 
 James represents a third of his working day ; 
 therefore the clothes which, with one loaf 
 
 Fio. 5. — Income of James under Condition No. 2.
 
 WAGES AND THE PRODUCTS OF WORK 73 
 
 daily — or 365 loaves during the year — he will be 
 able to purchase from George, will be as many as 
 George can make during one-third of the year, 
 or four months ; and the amount of furniture 
 he can purchase from Joseph will be de- 
 termined in the same way. Let us suppose, 
 then, that in the third part of a year George 
 can produce one complete outfit of clothes, 
 and Joseph can produce a table, a three-legged 
 stool, and a set of wooden dishes. James's 
 income for such a year will be the 365 loaves 
 he consumes himself, one outfit of clothes, a 
 table, a three-legged stool, and a set of wooden 
 dishes. This condition of things is illustrated 
 in Fig. 4, p. 70. 
 
 But now let us suppose that whilst James's 
 own labour and its immediate products under- 
 go no change whatever — whilst James still 
 works as he has done hitherto, and produces 
 the same loaves daily, clothes-making and 
 carpentry, by some miracle, both of them 
 become easier; so that George, in the third 
 part of a year, produces not only one outfit of 
 clothes, but a pillow, a bolster, and a stufied 
 quilt also, and Joseph in the same time pro- 
 duces an arm-chair and two spoons, besides
 
 74 WAGES AND THE PRODUCTS OF WORK 
 
 the table, the stool, and the wooden dishes. 
 In this case James, in return for the loaves 
 with which he supplies George and Joseph, 
 will receive, in addition to what he received 
 before, a pillow, a bolster, a stuffed quilt, two 
 spoons, and an arm-chair, as is shown in the 
 picture of his income " under condition No 2," 
 Fig. 5, p. 72. 
 
 Fig. 6. 
 
 It is true that in actual life such changes 
 as these are not brought about by miracles ; 
 but the preceding simple illustration will make 
 it quite clear to the reader how an art such 
 as agriculture may remain comparatively 
 stationary whilst all other arts progress ; and 
 yet the agriculturist's income, without any 
 effort of his own, may be augmented by an
 
 WAGES AND THE PRODUCTS OF WORK 75 
 
 increase due to the progress of other arts. 
 There is a good deal implied in all this which 
 we will consider presently ; but first, as an aid 
 in doing so, let us realise the following point. 
 The increase we have just been supposing 
 in the income of our imaginary peasant 
 cultivator is merely the increase with which 
 
 Left to James as 
 wages. 
 
 Taken in rent by 
 landlord. 
 
 Fig. 7. 
 
 we are all familiar under the name (so mis- 
 leading because it has been so arbitrarily 
 restricted to land) of the " unearned incre- 
 ment." Were the bread-producing industries 
 of this country protected from all foreign 
 competition, the whole country would ring 
 at once with the accounts given by Eadicals 
 of the monstrous additional income that would
 
 76 WAGES AND THE PRODUCTS OF WORK 
 
 be poured into the landlords' pockets. But 
 this increment, the genesis of which would be 
 so obvious in the case of the landlords, would 
 take place just the same if all landlordism 
 were abolished, and if the whole soil of the 
 country were tilled by peasants owning it. 
 The income of the agricultural landlord is 
 simply a part of the value of the gross agri- 
 cultural products, or, as we call them for 
 simplicity's sake, of a certain number of loaves 
 produced from his land, no matter how ; and 
 to the rest of the community, who give goods 
 in exchange for these loaves, it makes no 
 matter whatever how these goods are divided : 
 whether, as in Fig. 6, p. 74, the whole of 
 them go to James the cultivator, and his in- 
 come is raised, as w^e supposed it to be, from its 
 original small amount ; or whether, as in Fig. 
 7, p. 75, the whole of this supposed increase 
 — that is to say, the articles marked I — is taken 
 by a landlord, and James is left in his original 
 position. And, with regard to every kind of 
 commodity, from the point of view of the 
 entire community, except that particular frac- 
 tion of it by which the commodity in question 
 is manufactured, the same thing is true. Let
 
 WAGES AND THE PRODUCTS OF WORK 77 
 
 US, for instance, take the case of clothing and 
 bedding. To get a certain amount of these, 
 James, as we have just seen, has to give 
 George a specified number of loaves. It 
 makes no matter to James what George 
 does with them, whether he eats them all 
 himself or shares them with a boy who 
 helps him. 
 
 Here, then, comes the point which I wish 
 to impress on the reader. It makes no matter 
 whatever to our present argument whether 
 James, George, and Joseph are taken to re- 
 present a composite body of capitalists and 
 wage-earners, and their incomes to represent 
 a total of wages and profits ; or whether we 
 eliminate the capitalist from our conception 
 altogether, and assume each workman to be 
 his own employer, and to receive as wages the 
 entire amount of goods which comes to him in 
 exchange for those which he himself produces. 
 Our illustration, therefore, will, for our present 
 purpose, be just as true to the facts of the 
 present day if we assume the gross income of 
 every industry to consist altogether of wages 
 taken by the workmen. 
 
 We are now able to translate what has been
 
 78 WAGES AND THE PRODUCTS OF WORK 
 
 said about James's income into the current 
 language of the day. That income — or, as we 
 will now call it, his wages — consisted, as we 
 saw, of the one loaf he ate himself and the 
 goods which he received in exchange for two 
 loaves. Thus two-thirds of his wages con- 
 sisted, not of a constant quantity of goods he 
 produced himself, but of the varying quantity 
 of other goods which he got in exchange for 
 them. The amount of the goods he got in 
 exchange was neither more nor less than the 
 price at which his goods sold. The reader 
 will at last see, if he has not seen it before, 
 what is the precise point at which I am aiming, 
 namely, the relationship between wages and 
 prices ; and it will be apparent, from the 
 illustrations given, that in any community in 
 which there is division of labour, wages are 
 not only related to prices, but they actually 
 are prices. They are either the whole or some 
 proportion of the assorted aggregate of com- 
 modities received in return for some one com- 
 modity by the producer of it. 
 
 Such being the case, the question which I 
 shall ask the reader to consider is this : Are 
 prices regulated by what the producer con-
 
 WAGES AND THE PRODUCTS OF WORK 79 
 
 siders that his wages ought to be ? or are his 
 wages regulated by what the purchaser con- 
 siders that prices ought to be ? It is impossible 
 to illustrate this question better than by re- 
 ferring once again to the last great coal-strike, 
 which has already been mentioned as a great 
 object lesson in economics. What the leaders 
 in that strike endeavoured to teach the colliers 
 was, that the prices of coal could be regulated 
 by the colliers' habits and requirements to 
 such an extent that their wages should never 
 fall below a sum which had been fixed 
 arbitrarily, which, compared with the wages 
 of other industries, was exceptionally high, 
 and which had not been obtained by the men 
 till within comparatively recent years. This 
 question is involved in nearly all the industrial 
 struggles of the day ; and it is specially 
 desirable that all who would deal with such 
 struggles, or form an opinion about the rights 
 and wrongs of them, should master the rudi- 
 ments of it thoroughly. It was not peculiar 
 to the coal -strike. The coal -strike is taken 
 solely as a striking and convenient illus- 
 tration. 
 
 The real bearings of this question are
 
 So IMAGES AND THE PRODUCTS OF WORK 
 
 constantly obscured by the introduction of the 
 question of the masters' profits ; and the first 
 great truth wliich should always be put before 
 the public on the occasion of any struggle 
 to make wages regulate prices is, that the 
 masters' profits, or the fact of there being any 
 masters in the 
 
 COAL 
 
 p 
 
 i 
 
 2 <t c 
 
 
 
 1 < 
 
 J> • 
 
 Fig. 8. 
 
 case at all, has 
 
 nothing to do 
 
 with the point 
 
 fundamentally 
 
 at issue. A strike such as 
 
 that of the colliers is really a 
 
 strike, not against the masters, 
 
 but the public. The masters 
 
 are merely the intermediaries 
 
 through whom the blow is transmitted. This 
 
 has been already explained by the aid of Figs. 
 
 6 and 7 ; but it is so essential for the reader 
 
 to understand the matter thoroughly, that 
 
 I will explain it again, with the aid of a 
 
 fresh set of illustrations. In the adjoining 
 
 figure (8) we have two parallelograms of equal 
 
 size, one of which represents a given quantity 
 
 of coal, and the other, P P, the total price 
 
 (whether we think of this as money or goods)
 
 WAGES AND THE PRODUCTS OF WORK 8i 
 
 for which it exchanged in the year 1890 ; and 
 we have a similar parallelogram, Pg Pg, which 
 represents the reduced price of the same 
 quantity of coal at the end of the year 1893. 
 Now, the sums represented by either of these 
 parallelograms must all go in wages, or else 
 be divided, as in P P, into wages and profits 
 by some such line as a, h, or c; and profits 
 must, in the opinion of the Trade Union 
 leaders, be a legitimate portion of the total 
 receipts, or not. If not, then the whole ought 
 to go in wages, and when the workmen have 
 got their rights, prices and wages will be co- 
 extensive, so that any fall or rise in prices 
 will be merely another expression for a fall 
 or rise in wages. But if, on the other hand, 
 profits are legitimate, and necessarily form 
 some fraction, no matter how small, of the 
 total receipts, the relation of wages to prices 
 will remain just the same. A fall in prices, 
 for instance, from 24 to 18 would diminish 
 wages in exactly the same proportion, whether 
 the whole of each sum went in wages or only 
 five-sixths of it. Wages would fall from 24 
 to 18 in the one case, and from 20 to 15 in 
 the other, and would depend on prices in 
 
 6
 
 82 WAGES AA'D THE PRODUCTS OF WORK 
 
 either case just the same. We shall therefore 
 be simplifying the question, without in any 
 degree altering it, if we treat the total amount 
 of coal produced by any given number of 
 colliers in a given time as being entirely their 
 own property, and consider their wages as the 
 total of the commodities which they will get 
 from the rest of the public in exchange for 
 that coal. Now, in 1890 the public were 
 willing to give commodities to an amount 
 represented by the parallelogram P P for an 
 amount of coal rej^resented by the black paral- 
 lelogram that corresponds to it; and in 1893 
 they were willing to give only commodities to 
 the amount represented by the parallelogram 
 Pg P2, which last is less than the former by an 
 amount represented by the parallelogram, with 
 dotted outlines, D. The whole problem, then, 
 is a problem which has to do with the amount of 
 commodities represented by the parallelogram 
 D. As a matter of fact, the public refused any 
 longer to part with these, and yet demanded 
 from the colliers the same amount of coals ; and 
 the colliers' question is this : Can they by com- 
 bination among themselves compel the public in 
 exchange for this same amount of coals to give
 
 USAGES AND THE PRODUCTS OF WORK 83 
 
 them daily this amount of commodities, which, 
 for some reason or other, the public wished to 
 withhold ? The Trade Union leaders have been 
 teaching the colliers that they can. They 
 have been teaching them, in other words, that 
 prices can be regulated by wages, instead of 
 wages being obliged to follow prices. How 
 far is such teaching true ? This is the point 
 that I am anxious to make clear. 
 
 I ask " HoiD far is it true ? " instead of 
 asking whether it is true or false, because 
 within certain limits it is true beyond all 
 doubt, and is only false when these limits are 
 passed. Let us first consider a set of circum- 
 stances under which it would be entirely true. 
 We can do this more conveniently by referring 
 again to Fig. 3, and again presenting to our 
 imagination a community of three persons, 
 James, George, and Joseph, each of whom 
 produces enough for three persons of one of 
 the prime necessaries of life, each keeping a 
 third of what he himself produces and taking 
 a third of the products of the other two. Now, 
 what each of these men takes of the products of 
 the other two has a double aspect. It is at once 
 prices and wages. It is prices as seen by the
 
 84 WAGES AND THE PRODUCTS OF IVORK 
 
 man who parts with it ; it is wages as seen by 
 the man wlio takes it. Thus, when James, as 
 shown in Fig. 4, gives one-third of his bread- 
 stuffs to George and receives a coat in return 
 for them, the coat is the price which is paid 
 for the bread by George, and it is the wages 
 which James receives for his labour in produc- 
 ing the bread. Now, the prices in a community 
 like this must follow wages — that is to say, 
 their amount must conform to the wants of 
 the recipient of the exchanged commodities. 
 The goods of which they consist must, to use 
 the phrase of the moment, be of such an 
 amount as to constitute " a living wage " ; and 
 the reason is obvious. In such a community 
 as this each man of the three imperatively 
 requires a third of what each of the other two 
 can give him, in order to live at all, or, at all 
 events, to live in a condition which will enable 
 him to produce goods which are similarly 
 necessary for the others. 
 
 And now, bearing this in mind, let us 
 amplify our community as follows. Let us 
 impute to its members one new want, namely, 
 coal. Let us imagine their climate such that, 
 without a fire in his cottage, neither James
 
 WAGES AND THE PRODUCTS OF WORK 85 
 
 nor George nor Joseph would be able to pre- 
 serve his life ; and let lis accordingly add to 
 them a fourth companion, Thomas, who is 
 just able, by working as hard as the others, to 
 provide himself and them with just as much 
 coal as is necessary, but only just as much. 
 In order to make the presence of Thomas 
 possible, we must assume that James is able 
 to make four loaves instead of three, that 
 George is able to make four suits of clothes 
 instead of three, and that Joseph similarly 
 can make additional furniture. What, then, 
 will be the position of Thomas ? Besides the 
 coal which he keeps for his own fire, he will 
 require, in order to keep himself alive, a 
 fourth of the furniture produced by Joseph, a 
 fourth of the clothes produced by George, and 
 a fourth of the bread produced by James. He 
 will, that is to say, require to receive these 
 things as the wages of his labour, and the 
 others will, accordingly, be obliged to give 
 them to him as the price of his coals. Thus, 
 in a simple community of the kind we have 
 imagined, prices not only can but must be 
 kept at a point that will yield a certain wage 
 to the producer.
 
 .<€ 
 
 Lu: 
 
 LW. 
 
 LW. 
 
 LW. 
 
 J A M E S. 
 
 QEQRGE.__l_J_OS E_P_H_._ _■ _ _T_H_OMA S._ LLM_QJJi_Y, 
 
 
 C.2. ^ _ I 
 
 Fig. 9. 
 
 Fio. 9a. 
 
 8 S S S, Surplus articles, which may either be consumed as luxuries by the 
 producers, or given to Timothy in exchange for cigars, as in Fig. 9 a. 
 L W, "Tlie living wage" of the producer, as described in the text. 
 C 1, Cigars produced by Timothy, distributed in one possible way. 
 C 2, „ „ distributed in another possible way.
 
 WAGES AND THE PRODUCTS OF WORK 87 
 
 But the reason of this fact is almost as 
 obvious as its necessity. The reason is, that 
 in the case with which we are dealing the 
 requisites of life are the same for everybody 
 concerned, and each requisite is for each man 
 equally and absolutely necessary. But the 
 moment such a community begins to make 
 any advance, and, by learning more of the arts 
 of cultivation and manufacture, becomes able 
 to provide itself with any articles of comfort 
 and luxury — with anything beyond the in- 
 evitable necessaries we have been considering 
 — the relation of prices and wages begins to 
 undergo a change. I will explain this by a 
 very simple illustration. Let us suj)pose our 
 community to have advanced so far in the 
 arts that each of its four members, without 
 any additional effort, can now produce five 
 articles for every four that he produced 
 formerly. Thus James has daily an extra loaf 
 of bread and Thomas has daily fuel for an 
 extra fire (see S S S S, Fig. 9). Now these 
 extra articles are capable of being regarded 
 and treated in one or the other of two totally 
 different ways. They may be regarded and 
 used as luxuries by the four men producing
 
 88 WAGES AXD THE PRODUCTS OF WORK 
 
 them — James, for instance, overeating himself 
 on two loaves, and Thomas toasting himself at 
 a fire that is twice as big as formerly ; or 
 they may be regarded and nsed as a complete 
 set of necessaries, capable of sustaining the life 
 of some fifth producer. Now let us suppose 
 that at this juncture a fifth producer — Timothy 
 — appears on the scene, who is capable of pro- 
 ducing tobacco to the amount, let us say, of 
 twenty cigars daily, and offers to supply the 
 others with them in return for a supply of 
 necessaries like those on which the others 
 sustain themselves. Let the reader observe 
 how now we have an entirely new situation. 
 Timothy's position with regard to James, 
 George, Joseph, and Thomas is fundamentally 
 diff"erent to what theirs is with regard to 
 one another. These four must all combine 
 to keep each other alive, and must therefore 
 pay prices which will yield each other a 
 certain wage ; but Timothy and his cigars 
 are not necessary, and there is no reason, 
 so far as they are concerned, why they 
 should do anything to keep him alive at all. 
 Let us suppose that none of them liked 
 smoking, or that Timothy's cigars were very
 
 WAGES AND THE PRODUCTS OF WORK 89 
 
 rank, and made them sick. Why should 
 Thomas, for instance, deprive himself of the 
 luxury of a fire all night, in order to purchase 
 something which he would far rather be with- 
 out ? It is evident, then, that the first 
 question with regard to Timothy is, not what 
 wage shall he get, but whether he shall get 
 any wage at all. Let us suppose, however, 
 that Thomas and his three coadjutors try 
 Timothy's cigars and like them. Thomas 
 thinks on the whole that he gets more pleasure 
 from smoking than he does from an extra fire ; 
 George would sooner have a cigar in his mouth 
 daily than a new suit of clothes twice instead 
 of once a year ; and James and Joseph come 
 to conclusions of a like kind. Each, therefore, 
 decides to ofi'er Timothy the extra fifth part 
 of his own particular products, and thus 
 between them to supply him with a living 
 wage. The situation is shown clearly in Fig. 
 9. The four contiguous columns L W re- 
 present the living wage, or the actual 
 necessaries of life, for the four original pro- 
 ducers. The articles above these, S S S S, re- 
 present their surplus products, which they 
 may either consume as luxuries or ofi'er to
 
 90 ]\'AGES AM) THE PRODUCTS OF WORK 
 
 Timothy, as shown in the detached column 
 (Fig. 9a), as the price of his cigars. Tliat 
 minimum price they must give him ; but now 
 comes the vexed question. Each of the other 
 producers keeps one-fifth of the goods produced 
 by him for his own use. Shall Timothy be 
 allowed to keep one-fifth of his cigars for his 
 owTi smoking (as shown in the arrangement 
 C 1 ), in which case the five men will have four 
 cigars each, and the wages of all be equal? 
 or will he be obliged to give away the whole 
 of them (as shown in the arrangement C 2), in 
 which case each of the other men would have 
 five cigars, and Timothy himself none, and thus 
 the other men's wage would be 25 per cent 
 more than his ? The answer to this question 
 rests altogether with the consumers. If they 
 decide to have cigars at all, they must pay 
 Timothy a price for them which will enable 
 him to keep body and soul together; but 
 whether they allow him to keep so much as a 
 single cigar for himself depends altogether, not 
 upon him, but them. It depends on the 
 degree of pleasure which these men find in 
 smoking. The more the reader considers this, 
 the more clearly will he see the truth of it.
 
 WAGES AND THE PRODUCTS OF WORK 91 
 
 Let us, for instance, take the case of tlie collier 
 Thomas. He, every day, has a clay's surplus 
 fuel — let us call it 501b. This is the minimum 
 price he can pay so as to get any cigars at all, 
 for without it the cigar-maker could not be 
 kept alive. The point at issue is, How many 
 cigars will he demand for it ? Four, or five ? 
 In one case the price of each cigar will be 8 lb. 
 of coal, in the other lOlb. ; and as it is entirely 
 a matter of choice with him whether he buys 
 any, he is the arbiter of what price he will pay. 
 And now let us view the matter from 
 Timothy's standpoint, not Thomas's. Let us 
 suppose that Timothy finds some other means 
 of warming himself, and thus the collier's coal 
 becomes a luxury to the cigar-maker, just as 
 the cigar-maker's cigars are a luxury to the 
 collier. The cigar-maker now can turn tables 
 on the collier ; and just as the collier in the 
 first case could fix the price of cigars, so in 
 the second the cigar-maker can fix the price of 
 coals. The price will depend on the difference 
 between the pleasure which he feels he will 
 derive from the warmth of a coal fire, and the 
 pleasure which he feels he will derive from 
 warmth obtained by some other means ; and.
 
 92 WAGES AXD THE PRODUCTS OF WORK 
 
 having settled with liimself what this differ- 
 ence is, he will weigh it with the pleasure which 
 he will derive from smoking his own cio;ars. 
 
 Here at last we have a virtually exact 
 counterpart to the actual position of the 
 colliers in this country as related to the price- 
 paying public. For the public a certain 
 amount of coal is indeed a necessity, either 
 directly, for domestic consumption, or in- 
 directly, for the production of necessaries; 
 but by far the larger part that is actually 
 consumed is consumed for the sake of pro- 
 ducing comforts and conveniences, either 
 directly, on the consumer's hearth, or in- 
 directly, in the production of commodities ; 
 and domestic consumption, though a small part 
 of the total consumption, is yet a complete 
 type of it. In Fig. 8 coal was represented by 
 a black parallelogram. Let us now represent 
 it by a parallelogram again, but let us sub- 
 divide this, and analyse it, as in Fig. 10, into 
 a kitchen fire, which represents a necessary, a 
 sitting-room fire, which represents comfort, 
 and a library fire, which represents luxury ; 
 and let us say that these fires consume J- cwt. 
 each, or Ij cwt. in the aggregate. And now
 
 WAGES AND THE PRODUCTS OF WORK 93 
 
 let us place this parallelogram, as in Fig. 11, 
 just above another, P P, which shall represent 
 the price paid for thus much coal in the year 
 1890; and we will suppose this price, if 
 expressed in goods, to be two chops, two 
 
 ^ 
 
 mXMf 
 
 Lis 
 
 p 
 
 ^a -i 
 
 Fig. 10. 
 
 P2 
 
 P2 
 
 4/; 4' 
 
 Fig. 11. 
 
 cigars, and two bottles of beer. The con- 
 sumer is willing to pay this for three fires, 
 because the total income which he is able to 
 spend is sufficient to leave him, when he has 
 done so, a similar amount of beer, tobacco, and 
 meat, P P, for his own consumption. Three 
 years later, however, the income which he is
 
 94 WAGES AND THE PRODUCTS OF WORK 
 
 able to spend is dimmislied, for some reason or 
 other, by one bottle of beer. Unwilling, there- 
 fore to diminish his own consumption of beer, 
 he oilers the collier, for the same amount of 
 coal, one bottle of l)ecr less than formerly, as 
 shown in the parallelogram Pg Pg- This is 
 virtually what happened previous to the recent 
 coal-strike. If we assume each of the articles 
 in question to be worth 4d., we have a fall in 
 the price of coal from 2s. per 1 J cwt. to Is. 8d. 
 per Ij cwt., or from £1:7:6 per ton to 
 about £1 : 2 : 2j ; but this familiar way of stat- 
 ing the case obscures the real point at issue. 
 The problem for the consumer was virtually a 
 problem connected, not with all the three fires, 
 but with one only — with the library fire. 
 Would the colliers take one bottle of beer for 
 that instead of two? It is needless to say 
 that the colliers would not wish to do so. 
 They would not wish to lose a bottle of beer a 
 day. But the question is, Would they be able 
 to get the extra bottle from the consumer, if 
 the consumer became unwilling to part with it ? 
 And the answer to this depends altogether on 
 the result of the mental sum which is done 
 by the consumer, not the producer — a sum
 
 WAGES AND THE PRODUCTS OF WORK 95 
 
 which shows him which would give him most 
 pleasure : one bottle of beer and a fire in his 
 library, or three bottles of beer which he would 
 have to drink in his sitting-room if he decided 
 not to have any fire in his library at all. The 
 collier, no doubt, has to do a mental sum like- 
 wise ; but it is a sum which is set for him by the 
 consumer, not by himself. For let us suppose 
 that the collier, not perceiving this, will not 
 submit to the reduction that the consumer 
 demands, and refuses to part with his coal at 
 less than the former price. In that case, 
 though his prices are kept up, his wages will 
 fall ; for instead of getting each day from the 
 consumer two chops and two cigars, and two 
 bottles of beer, as the price of three fires, he 
 will get only two chops and two cigars, with- 
 out any beer at all, as the price of two fires. 
 
 Let me sum up the whole matter briefly. 
 In proportion as a community learns to pro- 
 duce and to desire an increasing number of 
 superfluities — that is to say, of goods not 
 physically necessary for the actual support of 
 life — it becomes more and more true with 
 regard to each fresh superfluity that the 
 amount of goods which the men who produce
 
 96 WAGES AND THE PRODUCTS OF WORK 
 
 it will be able to exact in exchange for it from 
 the bulk of the community, depends on the 
 degree of satisfaction which the bulk of the 
 community expect to derive from it, as com- 
 pared with that which they expect to derive 
 from the other superfluities which they produce 
 and possess themselves. If they wish to have 
 such and such a commodity at all, there is a 
 certain minimum that they must pay for it — a 
 minimum just sufficient to keep the producer 
 alive as a working animal ; but any price that 
 they pay for it beyond this depends altogether 
 on the degree of value that they themselves 
 place on it ; for if the producer, in order to 
 raise his wages, demands a larger price from 
 them than they are naturally willing to pay, 
 it is always open to them to say that they do 
 not wish him to produce it at all. 
 
 This is a proposition which would be just as 
 true of a community consisting altogether of 
 working men, as it is of a community con- 
 sisting of an employing class and an employed ; 
 and the strike-leaders, if they abolished every 
 employer in the kingdom, would find that just 
 as surely as at present, and far more obviously, 
 the price of any product produced, say by any
 
 WAGES AND THE PRODUCTS OF WORK 97 
 
 twentieth of the population, depended, not on 
 the wages that this one-twentieth wished for, 
 but on the prices that the other nineteen- 
 twentieths were willing to pay.
 
 CHAPTER IV 
 
 THE CENSUS AND THE CONDITION OF THE PEOPLE 
 
 Any reader who has grasped the simple and 
 fundamental principles explained in the two 
 preceding chapters — the principles by which 
 the minimum standard of living, and the 
 maximum wage in any given industry, are 
 determined, and has seen how absolutely inde- 
 pendent these are, in the last resort, of the 
 employing classes and their profits, will be 
 able to deal with ignorant agitators and their 
 dupes, not as a partisan, or an agitator of 
 another class, but as the exponent of interests 
 common to all classes alike, and an exponent 
 of laws which all classes must obey, or from 
 the disregard of which all classes must suffer. 
 
 Let us now turn back from these general 
 principles of all economic life to the general 
 condition of the people of this country at 
 the present moment; and consider a certain
 
 THE CONDITION OF THE PEOPLE 99 
 
 number of further facts relating to it, which 
 bear on the specific questions most frequently 
 touched upon by reformers. The principal 
 sources from which the information now about 
 to be given is derived are the several volumes 
 of the last Census Keport, and the Agricultural 
 Returns, published by the Board of Agriculture. 
 In order, however, to assist us in understand- 
 ing them, I will refer to further information 
 with which Mr. Gifien and other statisticians, 
 English and Continental, have supplied us. 
 
 The various points to which I will invite 
 the reader's attention have, as here set forth, 
 no logical connection with one another ; but 
 they all bear on the main subject of this volume, 
 namely, the condition of the people generally, 
 and the means by which the truth respecting 
 it may be best made public. 
 
 Seeing, then, that the most important of 
 the subjects now engaging us is the manner 
 in which wealth in this country is distributed, 
 it will be well to convey to the reader some 
 more or less clear idea of what the capitalised 
 wealth possessed by this country is, or, in 
 other words, what securities or possessions it 
 would be found to consist of, if we were, on
 
 joo THE CONDITION OF THE PEOPLE 
 
 any day of the year, to make an analytical 
 inventory of it. 
 
 The accompanying figure, then (Fig. 1), 
 represents this capitalised wealth by means of 
 a rough pictorial chart. The entire parallelo- 
 gram represents the total capital value of the 
 United Kingdom as a going concern, esti- 
 mated as being something like ten thousand 
 million pounds sterling ; and it is divided by 
 dark lines into thirteen compartments propor- 
 tionate in size to the value of the things or 
 goods which they represent. 
 
 It will not be necessary here to deal with 
 the figures in detail. I propose only to call 
 attention to a few broad facts, which are of 
 general interest and significance, which 
 speakers on social subjects will often find it 
 useful to remember. We will begin, then, 
 with considering the smallest and the two 
 largest items represented in the chart. 
 
 The smallest item of all is money and 
 uncoined bullion ; but, small as this shows 
 itself in the chart, in reality it is much 
 smaller. Had it been allotted its proper pro- 
 portion of space only, it would have been 
 hardly visible to the eye. Those who are
 
 Fia. 1.
 
 I02 THE COXDITJON OF THE PEOPLE 
 
 accustomed to think of wealth in terms of 
 money, and to argue as though it were 
 divisible and distributable like a pile of 
 sovereigns, cannot be answered better than 
 by an exposition of this fact. 
 
 The two largest items are houses and land, 
 the land counting for about fifteen hundred 
 millions, and the houses for twenty-five 
 hundred millions. 
 
 Next comes furniture, household goods, and 
 works of art, which are supposed to be worth 
 about twelve hundred millions; and public 
 works, imperial and local (with certain private 
 enterprises in the shape of gas and water- works 
 included), worth about eight hundred millions. 
 
 The other items, such as machinery, etc., 
 occupy, as capital, so small a space as compared 
 with their importance, because they are worn 
 out and consumed so rapidly. For instance, 
 iron- works are capitalised by Mr. GifFen at 
 four years' purchase ; land and railways at 
 twenty-eight, and houses at fifteen. 
 
 But there is another fraction of our capital 
 to which I have not yet alluded, and that is 
 our foreign loans and investments, represented 
 in the chart by the lowest section. These
 
 THE CONDITION OF THE PEOPLE 103 
 
 should properly come directly after the land, 
 of which in capital value they do not fall far 
 short ; but they have been placed at the end 
 in order to give them greater prominence : 
 because, as related to the incomes which they 
 represent, they offer certain points to our 
 consideration, which, in social and political 
 discussion, are of peculiar importance. 
 
 The income which comes into this country 
 from abroad is in round numbers seventy-Jive 
 million pounds, of which twenty-one millions 
 comes from foreign loans, four millions from 
 foreign railways, and fifty millions from 
 various investments. This is a sum far 
 greater than the entire agricultural rental of 
 the kingdom ; and the larger part of it goes 
 ultimately in the remuneration of home labour. 
 In other words, more than a million working- 
 class families, representing a population of 
 nearly five million individuals, live on wages 
 paid to them from an income that comes to us 
 from foreign sources. Now, with regard to 
 this income there are two points to be noticed. 
 One is, that it shows us how directly interested 
 the working classes are in our possessions in 
 other countries, and in the security of property
 
 I04 THE CONDITION OF TlfE PEOPLE 
 
 there. The other is, that this income is made 
 up entirely of profits and interest. Accord- 
 ingly five million working-class families in the 
 United Kingdom virtually draw their entire 
 incomes from profits and interest ; and were 
 there any general interference with the receipt 
 of these by the propertied and employing 
 classes, one of the first results to the working 
 classes of this country would be, that five 
 millions of them would be at once deprived of 
 the sole source from which their wages come. 
 
 Let us now pass on to the population 
 which subsists upon all the wealth in question. 
 This now amounts to thirty -seven or thirty-eight 
 million persons. That fact is probably known 
 to most people ; but the general idea which 
 this information usually conveys is a very 
 erroneous one. It usually conveys the idea of 
 a nation which consists principally of men and 
 women, or — as they are often called — of 
 citizens. The actual fact is that half the 
 population is under the age of twenty, and 
 nearly a third consists of children. Fig. 2 
 gives a general impression of what this propor- 
 tion is ; and for simplicity's sake the smallest 
 body of individuals is dealt with, which will
 
 5 ro >P rfARS 
 
 10 ro 20 vgA.Rg 
 
 20 ^■o 65 TtARS 
 
 Fig. 2
 
 io6 THE CONDITION OF THE PEOPLE 
 
 enable tlie smallest class to be represented by a 
 single person — the smallest class in this case 
 being persons over sixty-five. The reader 
 will see, then, that out of every eighteen 
 inhabitants, there are only eight persons, and 
 only four males, between the ages of twenty 
 and sixty-five. Half the population, there- 
 fore, at any given moment, may be said to be 
 undergoing the processes of being reared and 
 educated. Much education, however, is prac- 
 tical and technical, and is only gained by 
 experience in the actual work of life. Accord- 
 ingly, if we wish to consider the active 
 population of the country, we must take into 
 account everybody over the age of fifteen. 
 AVe will now proceed to consider these ; and 
 we shall be able to realise by the aid of the 
 opposite figure certain facts of the utmost 
 importance in social and political discussions. 
 
 Fig, 3 contains thirty-six persons — the 
 smallest number possible in this case to work 
 w^th. Half are males and half are females. 
 In reality, the latter exceed the former by one- 
 fifteenth ; but the difierence is too small to 
 be expressed conveniently in the illustration. 
 Roughly speaking, bachelors bear the same
 
 io8 THE CONDITION OF THE PEOPLE 
 
 proportion to married men that spinsters bear 
 to married women. 
 
 But the most important question which the 
 figure illustrates is that of occupation. A 
 vague belief prevails in the minds of many 
 persons that there exists in this country an 
 enormous unoccupied class of luxurious and 
 useless persons, whose sole business it is 
 to consume wealth in pampered and vicious 
 idleness ; and any ignorant, dishonest, or 
 hysterical persons, turning to the Census, 
 would be able to quote figures from it — and 
 this has been often done — which would ap- 
 parently justify this conclusion. For the 
 unoccupied class, as enumerated in the general 
 analysis of the population, is something like 
 55 per cent of the whole number. 
 
 A glance, however, at Fig. 2 will do much 
 to explain what at first sight seems so start- 
 ling ; for it will at once show us that the larger 
 part of this unoccupied class must be children. 
 Still, when we have deducted these, we find 
 about nine millions of unoccupied persons 
 enumerated over the age of ten — one million 
 seven hundred thousand males, and seven mid 
 a half million females. Even these reduced
 
 THE CONDITION OF THE PEOPLE 109 
 
 numbers are at first sight somewhat staggering : 
 but at all events we see that the larger portion 
 of the unoccupied consists of women. We will 
 consider these first. 
 
 If we deduct all females under the age of 
 fifteen, the unoccupied women will be reduced 
 to a number about equal to half the entire num- 
 ber of females above the age of fifteen. Now of 
 these females above the age of fifteen, more than 
 half are married ; therefore the number of un- 
 occupied women in this country is less than the 
 number of married women. Speaking broadly, 
 the mass of women in this country, who are re- 
 turned in the Census Report as unoccupied, are 
 married women ; whilst a fraction of these even 
 is returned as occupied. The position of afi"airs 
 is indicated with substantial accuracy in Fig. 
 3. The shaded portions of that figure repre- 
 sent the occupied population, the unshaded 
 portion the unoccupied ; and of the women 
 returned as unoccupied most are married. 
 I say " returned as unoccupied " ; for are they 
 so in reality ? They are very far from being 
 so, as was pointed out by the compilers of the 
 previous Census. The bulk of them are en- 
 gaged in occupations second in importance to
 
 no THE CONDITION OF THE PEOPLE 
 
 none — the occupation of looking after the 
 home welfare of their husbands — and one more 
 momentous yet — the occupation of feeding 
 the infancy and forming the character in child- 
 hood of that great third of our population who 
 will so soon be in their parents' places. 
 
 And now let us turn to the men. Of the 
 one, million seven hundred thousand occupied 
 males, over ten years of age, about one million 
 two hundred thousand are under fifteen, and 
 about two hundred and fifty thousand are under 
 twenty or over sixty -five, so that of males be- 
 tween twenty and sixty-five there are not more 
 than tivo hundred and fifty thousand unoccu- 
 pied ; and this number includes something like 
 fifty thousand of the insane, and the unoccu- 
 pied blind and deaf and dumb males between 
 the ages in question. If we deduct these, we 
 reduce the number of the unoccupied to two 
 hundred thousand ; and again, of those two 
 hundred thousand, more than forty thousand 
 are men who have retired from business after 
 their fifty-fifth year, and nearly six thousand 
 are pensioners above the same age ; whilst the 
 number of males between twenty and sixty- 
 five returned as " living on their own means "
 
 THE CONDITION OF THE PEOPLE in 
 
 is not more than ninety-two thousand. If, 
 therefore, we estimate the unoccupied males 
 capable under pressure of being added to the 
 army of the occupied, as numbering as many 
 as a hundred and fifty thousand, we shall be 
 far beyond the mark rather than short of it. 
 The result, then, on the entire community of 
 the unoccupied giving themselves to industry 
 would be to shorten the toil of the occupied 
 classes by about one minute in the hour. Ac- 
 cordingly, so far as it relates to the unoccupied 
 males, Fig. 3 must be corrected. That shows 
 one unoccupied adult male to seventeen occu- 
 pied. There is in reality only one to sixty. 
 
 We will now pass to a question which, more 
 perhaps than any other, throws a distinct light 
 on the welfare of the great mass of the people, 
 namely, the question of how they are lodged. 
 The Census with regard to this gives us an 
 amount of information, the existence of which 
 is probably unsuspected by many. 
 
 The Census divides the houses or tenements 
 occupied by separate families in England and 
 Wales into two broad classes — those which con- 
 sist of five rooms and upwards, and those which 
 consist of less than five rooms. About half
 
 112 THE CONDITION OF THE PEOPLE 
 
 the tenements belong to the latter class. That 
 is to say, about half the families in England 
 and Wales occupy tenements containing four 
 rooms, and under ; and these are classified 
 into tenements of four rooms, three rooms, two 
 rooms, and one room. What proportion of the 
 families in question occupy each ? The pro- 
 portion can be understood instantly by refer- 
 ence to Fig. 4. It will there be seen that out 
 of every fifty tenements twenty-three consist 
 of four rooms, twelve of three, eleven of two, 
 and only four of one. In many of the two- 
 roomed tenements, however, there is a con- 
 siderable amount of overcrowding — the term 
 "overcrowding" being used by the compilers 
 of the Census as meaning an average of more 
 than two persons to one room. But the pro- 
 portion of the population thus lodged is not 
 more than 11 per cent; and in many cases, 
 as will be pointed out presently, such over- 
 crowding is not by any means an indication of 
 extreme poverty. 
 
 The most important question, however, for 
 us to consider is not how the population are 
 lodged now, but whether, under the existing 
 economic system, their condition is tending to
 
 114 THE CONDITION OF THE PEOPLE 
 
 get better or worse. The favourite common- 
 place of the socialistic agitator is that their 
 condition is becoming steadily worse, and that 
 nothing but an industrial revolution can ever 
 make it grow better. A conclusive answer to 
 this false and ignorant doctrine is to be found, 
 put very briefly, in the Census volume that 
 relates to Scotland — a country with regard to 
 which the statistics are in some respects more 
 elaborately tabulated than those relating to 
 England and Wales. The statistics to which 
 I am now referring are illustrated in Fig. 5. 
 The houses and tenements in Scotland can, by 
 the information given us, be readily divided 
 into six classes — those containing more than 
 ten rooms, those containing from five to ten 
 rooms, those containing from three to four 
 rooms, those containing two rooms, those 
 consisting of one room with a window, and 
 those consisting of one room without a 
 window. Of this last and miserable class 
 there were in Scotland in 1881 no fewer than 
 seven thousand, containing seven thousand 
 families. In 1891 there were only three 
 hundred and ninety-eight, of which only eight 
 were in towns, the remainder being probably
 
 11 6 THE CONDITION OF THE PEOPLE 
 
 remote HiQ:hlaud cabins. Of tlie remaininoj 
 five classes of dwelling, Fig. 5 shows the 
 numbers, out of every fifty families, occupying 
 each. But the important point to notice is not 
 the numbers themselves, but their respective 
 increase or decrease. If we confine ourselves 
 to dwellings of less than five rooms, we see 
 that the poorer dwellings are decreasing in pro- 
 portion to their poverty, and the superior class 
 increasing in proportion to their superiority. 
 The windowless cabins, as we have seen, have 
 almost disappeared ; the one-roomed dwellings 
 with windows have decreased 25 per cent ; the 
 two-roomed dwellings have increased by 8 per 
 cent, and the three -roomed and four-roomed 
 dwellings by 17 per cent. It would be hard 
 to discover a sign of general progress more 
 definite and distinct than this, or one which 
 a speaker could use wdth greater efi'ect when 
 explaining to a popular audience the real nature 
 of the economic changes that are taking place 
 round us in the natural course of things. 
 
 And now let us turn back from Scotland to 
 the country considered generally, and examine 
 a different set of facts, also recorded in the 
 Census, which will throw further light on the
 
 THE CONDITION OF THE PEOPLE 117 
 
 condition and progress of the community. It 
 will be found that they illustrate and cor- 
 roborate those that have been already men- 
 tioned, and are equally adapted for use by 
 political speakers. 
 
 In Fig. 6 the numerals on the circumference 
 indicate the percentage of increase or decrease 
 in each of the industries, trades, or professions 
 named, between the years 1881 and 1891. 
 The shaded portion represents the growth of 
 the population during the same period. The 
 reader will therefore be able to see at once, 
 not only whether any body of men has 
 increased or decreased absolutely, but also 
 whether it has increased or decreased relatively 
 to the total population. It will be seen, for 
 instance, that the clergy of the Established 
 Church have increased absolutely by 11 per 
 cent, but that relatively to the population 
 they have not increased, they have only kept 
 pace with it. The Nonconformist clergy, on 
 the other hand, though they have absolutely 
 increased by 3 per cent, have relatively to 
 the population decreased by 8 per cent ; 
 whilst the Roman Catholic clergy have in- 
 creased absolutely by 20 per cent, and
 
 iiS THE CONDITION OF THE PEOPLE 
 
 relatively to the population by 9 per 
 cent. 
 
 To keep, however, to questions of merely 
 economic interest, the only large industrial 
 class that has decreased to any serious extent 
 absolutely is the agricultural labourers. To 
 the question of agriculture I shall refer again 
 presently. I will only observe here that the 
 number of farmers is nearly the same as it 
 was in 1881, whilst the number of market 
 gardeners has increased by 20 per cent, and 
 there is also an immense increase in the 
 amount of land used for market gardening. 
 
 The great cotton industry, as will be seen, 
 has kept pace with the population. But the 
 principal facts to which I wish to call atten- 
 tion are of a more general character than 
 these. They are facts which indicate that 
 whilst, during the period dealt with by the 
 Census, the wealthier classes have not greatly 
 changed their position relatively to the com- 
 munity, there has been a great growth of 
 wealth amongst the people generally, and an 
 immense accession to the ranks of the lower 
 middle classes. 
 
 With regard to the wealthier classes it is
 
 .CAS£ 
 
 Bc'?^.
 
 120 THE CONDITION OF THE PEOPLE 
 
 enougli to point out tliat the number of 
 domestic servants has not increased relatively 
 to the population ; but amongst the classes 
 which, roughly speaking, are described as the 
 lower -middle, the school teachers have in- 
 creased by 15 per cent, commercial travellers 
 by 24 per cent, shopkeepers by 27 per cent, 
 bank clerks by 30 per cent, and commercial 
 clerks by 34 per cent. 
 
 With regard to the shopkeepers I have a 
 special observation to make. It is one of the 
 fundamental doctrines of the party of social 
 agitation — a doctrine first formulated by Karl 
 Marx — that the inevitable tendency of the 
 capitalistic system is to crush out all the 
 smaller productive and distributive firms, and 
 mass their business into a number of colossal 
 enterprises, which will constantly increase in 
 magnitude and decrease in number. With 
 regard to distributive enterprise the Census 
 absolutely refutes this view, and shows that 
 the number of distributive enterprises is 
 increasing more than twice as fast as the 
 population. The Census returns, in this 
 respect, however, contain a certain amount 
 of possible error, as the compilers of the
 
 THE CONDITION OF THE PEOPLE 121 
 
 report indicate. I have therefore had recourse 
 to the London Post-office Directory for the 
 years 1881 and 1891, and compared the 
 number of separate businesses in London — 
 productive and distributive — at the two 
 periods ; and I find that the actual number 
 of separate businesses has increased by more 
 than 11 per cent, whilst, if we consider the 
 number of partners whose names appear in 
 these businesses, the increase has been 20 per 
 cent. Thus, from whatever point we look at 
 the matter, the smaller businesses, instead of 
 being crushed out, are increasing more rapidly 
 than the population. 
 
 And now let us consider the great masses 
 of the people. There are four facts illustrated 
 in Fig. 6 which throw light upon this. There 
 is the increase of 15 per cent in the school 
 teachers, which shows the progress of educa- 
 tion ; there is an increase of 21 per cent in 
 the butchers, which shows the general increase 
 of meat consumption ; there is an increase of 
 26 per cent in the doctors, which shows the 
 growing attention given to the popular health ; 
 and, lastly, there is an increase of 53 per cent 
 in the persons who professionally minister to
 
 122 THE CONDITION OF THE PEOPLE 
 
 amusement. It may be said that a part of 
 this increase is an increase in actors, singers 
 and others, who amuse the wealthier classes. 
 This is true ; but the figures of the Census 
 show us that the increase in this class is com- 
 paratively small, and that the great increase 
 has taken place amongst showmen, tumblers, 
 clowns, and so forth — that is to say, in that 
 precise section which ministers exclusively to 
 the amusement of the poorer classes. The in- 
 crease in this section is not less than 80 per 
 cent. Thus the masses have become able in 
 ten years very nearly to double their expendi- 
 ture on amusement. Let me add to these facts 
 another, not indicated in the diagram. The 
 computed capital of the Post-office Savings 
 Banks for England and Wales was in 1881 
 £33,771,412. In 1891 it was £66,018,228. 
 That is to say, in ten years it had very nearly 
 doubled itself. 
 
 Of the various points that have just been 
 mentioned, there now remain three about which 
 it would be well to speak more particularly, 
 as each one of these is constantly made the sub- 
 ject of loose and ignorant rhetoric. The first 
 of these is the position of the principal religious
 
 THE CONDITION OF THE PEOPLE 123 
 
 bodies in the kingdom, on which turns the 
 great question of disestablishment ; the second 
 is the condition of agriculture in this country, 
 as compared with its condition in others ; and 
 the third is the question of the housing of the 
 working classes, regarded in connection with 
 facts which have not yet been mentioned. 
 
 Let us begin with the question of religion, 
 which can be dealt with very briefly. It is 
 deeply to be regretted that a proper religious 
 Census has never yet been permitted. But 
 though we cannot directly tell the respective 
 numbers of those belonging to difierent denomi- 
 nations, we can get some indication of the truth 
 from the number of the religious ministers. 
 This the Census gives us ; and the results can 
 be seen at a glance in Fig. 7. In this, as in 
 former cases, the number dealt with in the 
 diagram is the smallest which it is possible to 
 work with for the purpose required. It will 
 be seen, then, from Fig. 7, that of every nine- 
 teen ministers of religion in England and Wales 
 thirteen are clergymen of the Established 
 Church, five are ministers of various Noncon- 
 formist bodies, and one is a Eoman Catholic 
 priest.
 
 Fig. 7.
 
 THE CONDITION OF THE PEOPLE 125 
 
 Let US now go back to agriculture — the 
 only industry in this country which has shown 
 symptoms of continuous decline. It is no 
 part of the purpose of this volume to set forth 
 any views as to the future of British agricul- 
 ture. All that I shall attempt to do here is 
 to call the reader's attention to a number of 
 facts which are not generally appreciated or 
 even known, and which will assist the reader 
 in forming his own conclusions. They are facts 
 some of which are susceptible of various inter- 
 pretations; but there are certain popular fallacies 
 which they at once refute ; so there is one un- 
 doubted moral which may at all events be 
 drawn from them. 
 
 Kadical and Socialistic reformers are con- 
 stantly declaring that agriculture in this 
 country would revive if we did but change our 
 land-system, and committed the cultivation of 
 the soil to small cultivators, who either actually 
 owned the areas cultivated by them, or held 
 them in perpetuity from the State on payment 
 of a land-tax. Indeed a ' ' labour member " in the 
 House of Commons actually said, during the last 
 Parliament, that were the land thus cultivated it 
 would yield four times what it does at present.
 
 126 THE CONDITION OF THE PEOPLE 
 
 Let any one who is inclined to believe in 
 this demented rhetoric turn to Fiof. 8. It 
 illustrates three orders of facts connected with 
 contemporary agriculture ; and will, amongst 
 other things, enable the reader to compare the 
 productivity of the soil, as cultivated in this 
 country, with its productivity in countries such 
 as France, Sweden, or Austria, where the very 
 conditions demanded by our own agitators 
 already prevail largely ; France having more 
 than a million landowners, with an average 
 holding of thirteen acres, whilst 33 per cent of 
 the soil of the Austrian Empire, and more than 
 half the soil of Sweden, is held by peasants. 
 The comparison is not complete, as its basis 
 is the production of w^heat only ; but it is 
 nevertheless valuable. 
 
 The upper series of parallelograms in Fig. 
 8, marked W W, and decreasing like steps, 
 represents the number of bushels of wheat per 
 acre yielded by the countries named. Of all 
 the countries named, except Holland, the yield 
 in this country is the highest. It is some 80 
 per cent higher than that of France, with its 
 peasant proprietors, and some 250 per cent 
 higher than that of America. The actual yield
 
 THE CONDITION OF THE PEOPLE 
 
 127 
 
 per acre, however, is not the only point to be 
 considered. We must also take into account 
 the immediate labour expended in producing 
 
 this, and the amount of capital by which that 
 labour is assisted. And, taking these into 
 consideration, the agricultural system of this 
 kingdom is seen to be, acre for acre, the most
 
 1 28 THE CONDITION OF THE PEOPLE 
 
 efficient in the civilised world. The flags P P 
 indicate, by the sums marked on them, the 
 value of the agricultural produce per hand 
 engaged in agriculture ; and the lower parallel- 
 ograms, C C, represent the amount of capital 
 employed for each hand. It will thus be seen 
 that, whilst the yield of wheat per acre in 
 Holland is but 6 per cent more than that in 
 this country, this excess involves the expendi- 
 ture of 40 per cent more capital, and results 
 in a product of 50 per cent less per hand. 
 
 It is by no means insinuated here that it is 
 possible, from the above data, to argue off hand 
 that the English land-system is a perfect 
 system, or even the best existing ; but it is 
 evident from them, at all events, that the 
 ordinary attacks levelled by agitators against 
 the system are groundless; and that the 
 agitators' promises of a reign of plenty, as the 
 result of " drastic legislation," and what is 
 grotesquely called " the restoration of the 
 people to the land," or of "the land to the 
 people," is a falsehood, without the smallest 
 warrant in experience. It is quite conceiv- 
 able that agriculture may be revived in time 
 by the application of the genius of gifted
 
 THE CONDITION OF THE PEOPLE 129 
 
 individuals — of men of science and men of 
 enterprise — to farming. Much may be done by- 
 technical improvements ; nothing can be done 
 by revolution. 
 
 And now we come to the last subject 
 which will be discussed in this volume, 
 namely, the housing of the working classes. 
 We have already considered the actual con- 
 dition of these classes in this respect as an 
 indication of their condition generally. Let 
 us consider it once more, in order to realise 
 the nature of the problem presented to us 
 by the miserable and demoralising dwellings 
 occupied by a section of the population. 
 
 According to the ordinary agitator the 
 cause of this misery is simple, and so also is 
 its remedy. The cause of it is the landlord ; 
 and the remedy for it is to rob him or get 
 rid of him. To whatever conclusion an 
 examination of facts may bring us, it will at 
 all events free us from the dominion of this 
 popular fallacy. Here and there a population 
 may be housed miserably owing to the ex- 
 tortions of a bad landlord ; but the con- 
 nection between high rents and insufficient 
 accommodation is a mere local or temporary 
 
 9
 
 130 THE CONDITION OF THE PEOPLE 
 
 accident, as will be shown presently by a set 
 of very curious statistics relating to the 
 housing of the poor classes in seventeen of 
 the most important towns in the kingdom. 
 But before passing to the consideration of 
 these, let us pause for a moment to examine 
 a question of fact, which is constantly and 
 wantonly misrepresented by the rancour of 
 uneducated, and even of educated, agitators. 
 I refer to the rental of the country taken as 
 a whole, including the rental of the ground 
 occupied by houses. How agitators arrive at 
 their figures is in some cases very difficult 
 to say ; but there has been recently an 
 aorreement between most of our more violent 
 reformers to estimate the rental of this 
 country, agricultural and urban, apart from 
 the rent paid for the actual structure of the 
 houses, at a hundred and sixty million 
 2J0unds^ annually. A sillier and more mon- 
 strous exaggeration it is not jDossible to 
 conceive. The real facts of the case — speak- 
 ing broadly — are accessible with extreme ease; 
 and there is no excuse for those who persist 
 
 ^ See, for instance, The Villacfer's Magna C'harta, by J. M. 
 Davidson, Barrister-at-law, p. 15.
 
 THE CONDITION OF THE PEOPLE 131 
 
 in misrepresenting them. Any one who is 
 familiar with the pages of " The Statistical 
 Abstract " knows where to find that the 
 agricultural rental of the United Kingdom 
 is about Jlfty-six million pounds, and that 
 the house rental is a hundred and forty - 
 four millions. The only point here which 
 presents any semblance of difficulty is one 
 presented by this latter sum : for it includes 
 not only the rental of the houses, but that of 
 the ground on which they are built. How 
 are we to discover what portion of it is paid 
 for the ground % It so happens that there is 
 a rough and ready way of discovering, not 
 indeed what is the exact fraction paid for the 
 ground, but the maximum amount that could, 
 under existing circumstances, be conceivably 
 paid for it. The most recent investigations into 
 the actual ground rental of London, which was 
 undertaken under the auspices of the London 
 County Council, have resulted in the conclusion 
 that the gross rental of the metropolis was about 
 forty millio7i pounds, and the actual ground 
 rental ahoutffteen millions. This, however, is an 
 extreme estimate, most statisticians estimating 
 the ground rental at thirteen millions. For
 
 132 THE CONDITION OF THE PEOPLE 
 
 argument's sake, however, let us assume it to 
 be fifteen millions. Now of all towns in the 
 kingdom the gross rental per head is highest 
 in London, the reason being the superior 
 value of the land. According to Mr. Mulhall 
 the rental per head in London is as compared 
 with the rental per head in Brighton as one 
 hundred and fifty is to one hundred and ten ; 
 with the rental per head in Newcastle as one 
 hundred and fifty is to one hundred and three ; 
 with that in Liverpool and Manchester as one 
 hundred and fifty is to one hundred ; with 
 that in BirmiuQ-ham and Bristol as one 
 hundred and fifty is to eighty : and as 
 regards the other towns in the kingdom, 
 the proportion of the gross rental which is 
 ground rent is in London more than double 
 the average. Let us, then, for argument's 
 sake, make the extreme supposition that the 
 proportion borne by ground rental to gross 
 rental in London obtains throughout all the 
 towns in the kingdom — that is to say, that 
 out of every £40 of gross rental £15 is ground 
 rent. Now the entire house rental of the 
 kingdom being a hundred and forty -four 
 millions, we shall, on the above assumption.
 
 THE CONDITION OF THE PEOPLE 133 
 
 get at the entire ground rent by this simple 
 proportion sum — -as forty is to fifteen so is 
 one hundred and forty-four to the rent 
 in question. The answer will be about 
 fifty-four million pounds. This, added to the 
 agricultural rental oi fifty -six millions, gives a 
 total rental of a hundred and ten tnillions, 
 instead of a hundred and sixty ; and even so 
 high a figure as this can be reached only by 
 the absurd imputation to every country town 
 in the kingdom of a ground rental which is 
 per acre nearly double that of Bristol and 
 Birmingham. Putting aside the exaggeration 
 involved in the above calculation, it will be 
 found impossible to estimate the rental of the 
 soil of this country — building land included — 
 at more than a hundred onillions annually. 
 The additional sixty millions which figure in 
 the computations of the land reformers are 
 therefore an entire invention of their own : 
 and whatever plausibility there may be in 
 their theory that the worst of the evils 
 connected with the present housing of the 
 poor are due to the extortions of the ground 
 landlord, depends on their imj)uting to these 
 landlords an annual abstraction from the public
 
 134 THE CONDITION OF THE PEOPLE 
 
 of sixtx) 7n{llion pounds, wliich is altogether 
 imaginary. 
 
 And now let us turn from these general 
 facts to the facts already alluded to, con- 
 nected with seventeen of the most important 
 towns of the kingdom. Of these towns special 
 mention is made in the Census Report with 
 reference to the question of overcrowding. 
 The meanincr attached to the term ove7^- 
 croivding is in each case the same, namely, 
 the occupation of one room as a dwelling by 
 more than two persons ; and the percentage of 
 the population that is overcrowded is given in 
 each case. The facts thus brought to liojht are 
 illustrated in Fio^. 9. 
 
 The parallelogram of which the figure 
 consists is divided into seventeen horizontal 
 sections, each section representing the popu- 
 lation of a town. The shaded portions of each 
 represent that portion of the population in 
 question which is housed more or less satis- 
 factorily. The unshaded portions represent 
 the percentage which is in each case over- 
 crowded. It will be seen that this percentage 
 is highest in certain northern towns, and in 
 Plymouth ; the percentage of overcrowding in
 
 Fig. 9.
 
 136 THE CONDITION OF THE PEOPLE 
 
 London being not half of what it is in Gates- 
 head, and not much more than half of what it 
 is in Newcastle. Again, in Liverpool the over- 
 crowding is about half of what it is in London ; 
 whilst in ]\Ianchester and Bristol it is less than 
 a half, in Preston less than a quarter, and in 
 Nottingham less than a sixth. Again, Ply- 
 mouth and Portsmouth are towns in many- 
 ways of the same character ; and yet Plymouth 
 is one of the four most overcrowded towns in 
 the kingdom, whilst there is in Portsmouth 
 hardly any overcrowding at all. 
 
 If there were any truth in the theory that 
 overcrowding is due to the extortion of the 
 landlords, we should find that the percentage 
 of overcrowding in the towns just named had 
 some general correspondence with the rents. 
 I have, therefore, indicated by the black 
 arrows in the diagram the rental per head in 
 those of the to\vTis named, which are men- 
 tioned in the most recent tables published by 
 Mr. Mulhall. The result of collating the two 
 sets of facts — those referring to overcrowding 
 and those referring to rent — is singular. Even 
 so shrewd an observer as Mr. Charles Booth is 
 disposed to think that rent will explain many
 
 THE CONDITION OF THE PEOPLE 137 
 
 seeming anomalies ; but it evidently supplies us 
 with tlie general solution of the problem what- 
 soever. Between high rents and overcrowd- 
 ing there is obviously no connection, except 
 here and there accidental ones. For though 
 Newcastle rents are the second highest in 
 the kingdom, and though Newcastle stands 
 second amongst our overcrowded towns, the 
 highest rents of all are those of London ; and 
 in point of overcrowding London stands 
 seventh. Again, in Sheffield the overcrowding 
 is greater than it is in Liverpool, and yet rent 
 in Sheffield is 40 per cent less. 
 
 Since I first drew public attention to these 
 facts, I have received letters from various parts 
 of the kingdom, mentioning a variety of local 
 circumstances that may explain them, such as 
 the inherited habits of the people in this and 
 that district, the architectural history of this 
 and that town, and the nature of the ground 
 on which it is built. For instance, it has been 
 pointed out that overcrowding in Plymouth, 
 as estimated by the number of families occupy- 
 ing single rooms, is due, in part at all events, 
 to the fact that the houses now occupied by a 
 section of the labouring classes were built for a
 
 138 THE CONDITION OF THE PEOPLE 
 
 wealthier class originally, and that the rooms in 
 them were exceptionally spacious ; whilst much 
 of the overcrowding in Newcastle is said to 
 be due to the peculiar lie of the ground, which 
 limits the number of houses capable of being 
 Ijuilt in the immediate neighbourhood of the 
 river, the locality most convenient for a large 
 proportion of the working classes. 
 
 This is not the place for pursuing these 
 questions of detail farther; but the facts already 
 mentioned point unmistakably to one great 
 conclusion — that overcrowding is an accident 
 of our industrial system, not a necessary 
 accompaniment of it. The same industrial 
 system prevails in Derby and Leicester that 
 prevails at Gateshead and in London, and yet 
 Fiof. 9 will show us how small the overcrowding 
 in the two former towns is. Conditions which 
 can be procured in one place can probably, 
 with time, and care, and prudence, be procured 
 in all. 
 
 And the moral to be drawn from these facts 
 as to the housing of the poor is equally appli- 
 cable to all the problems which a progressive 
 civilisation presents to the consideration of the 
 reformer. There are always social questions ;
 
 THE CONDITION OF THE PEOPLE 139 
 
 but there neither is, nor ever can be, any social 
 question. Every reform is a question of detail 
 — of careful and circumstantial modification. 
 It is not a question of revolutionising funda- 
 mental principles : and though nearly all 
 general statements are true only when allow- 
 ance is made for many exceptions, the fol- 
 lowing general statement is almost universal 
 in its truth — that should a man wish to 
 identify the points in the social system which 
 are unalterable, he will find them in the very 
 points which Socialists and similar reformers 
 most desire to alter. 
 
 THE END 
 
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