\J, N. THE FUTURE OF WORK AND OTHER ESSAYS SIX CENTURIES OF WORK AND WAGES By Professor Thorold Rogers. Eleventh Edition. Demy 8vo, cloth, 1016 net. WORK AND WAGES Chapters from "Six Centuries of Work and Wages" Eighth Edition. Crown 8vo, cloth, 2/6 net. Also a Paper Edition, II- net. THE ECONOMIC OUTLOOK By Edwin Cannan, M.A. Large crown 8vo, cloth, 5/- net. T. FISHER UNWIN LONDON THE FUTURE OF WORK AND OTHER ESSAYS BY L. G. CHIOZZA MONEY, M.P. AUTHOR OF "RICHES AND POVERTY" T. FISHER UNWIN LONDON : i ADELPHI TERRACE LEIPSIC : INSELSTRASSE 20 First published in 1914 ■v PREFACE £/> npHESE essays are mainly devoted to ^ phases of the industrial problem. The § paucity of output by our competitive system, § after more than a century of production by power, is demonstrated, and an attempt is made to outline an industrial system calcu- lated to yield a full harvest to Science while securing for the individual, albeit in an organised society, a maximum of U personal liberty. The conception of and '^ argument for The Great State — that the cj whole of the adult population should be o organised to produce a high minimum standard of life, and that such organisation would yield to the whole community not only the materials of such a standard but a quality and degree of leisure and liberty at present undreamed of — have been already given to the world by ^ a body of writers under the editorship of § Mr. H. G. Wells, and part of the essay entitled g " The Future of Work," which appears in this volume, has been before published. It 384705 vi PREFACE is here contrasted with a study of British material output which reveals the frustration of invention by commercial method, and shows how large a proportion of the working population has its labour misdirected and poured out in waste. It will be found of great interest to compare the studies of national expenditure and of commercial expansion which appear in these pages with the record of material pro- duction as it is. The scale of commercial operations, although it has undoubtedly ex- tended in recent years, is still small in relation to national needs and existing powers of pro- duction, and in the time to come the world's statistics of the opening years of the twentieth century, great as they are when compared with those of fifty years ago, will undoubtedly appear exceedingly insignificant. The petty scale upon which our operations are as yet conducted, with results which yield a poor product qualified by unequal distribution, still stultifies thought and makes it difficult to prosecute reforms of any great value. The truth about our national expenditure is that, even in relation to our existing National Dividend, it is neither enormous nor alarm- ing, and that if every penny of it were an expression of waste, it would furnish by no PREFACE vii means the largest example of economic frustra- tion which is revealed by study of our social and industrial fabric. I have dealt with this matter of proportion at some length in the essay entitled " The Road to Ruin," for I know of nothing more important than that we should bear constantly in mind that the affairs of 46,000,000 people, even when conducted on an inadequate scale, are necessarily expressed in large aggregates. To propose that we should spend an additional five shillings per head per annum in training our people does not sound alarming, but to vary expression and to propose the additional provision of £11,500,000 a year for the pur- poses of a national system of Continuation Schools is usually sufficient to end discussion on the subject, so imperfect is the power to perceive £11,500,000 as five shillings per head for 46,000,000 heads, and to realise that it is a trifling sum in relation even to our existing inadequate income — that income which under any system of industry must necessarily gain by the better training of the national personnel. Some of the essays in this volume have been before published in whole or part in various periodicals, and I should like here to express my indebtedness to the editors of " The Westminster Gazette," " The Daily News and viii PREFACE Leader," " The Daily Chronicle," " The Con- temporary Review," " The New Statesman," " Everyman," and " The Star," for giving them publicity. My thanks are due to Mr. James J. Mallon, the devoted secretary of the National Anti- Sweating League, for kindly revising the essay on " The Minimum Wage in Practice." L. G. Chiozza Money. May 16, 1914. CONTENTS FAOB I. POVERTY OF PRODUCTION . . 1 § 1. The Frustration of Production . 1 Small production of the modem State . . I The British Census of Production ... 1 Net output of industries .... 2 Manufacturing output in 1907 .... 4 Agricultural production in 1908 ... 5 Production of fisheries ..... 5 Aggregate of British material production . . 6 The increment of material wealth in 1907 . . 7 Distinction between material output and total National Income ...... 8 § 2. Enumeration of Producers Number of industrial workers in 1907 . Number of farm workers Enumeration of British producers Analysis of producers by age and sex The net product of £100 per worker . Analysis of net outputs in relation to sex and age Adult males produce much more than £100 per head 10 10 II 12 13 14 15 § 3. British Homes and their Furnishings 15 Paucity of production illustrated . . . 16 The production of buildings in 1907 . . . 16 The re-building that is needed . . . 18 Building workers falling in relation to population . 19 The poor production of furniture ... 20 What commerce has done with science . . 22 CONTENTS II. THE FUTURE OF WORK . § 1. The Divorcing of Wealth and Work In the land of private officials . Of consumers who are not producers The source of our wealth The reward of the coal-getters . Squalor at the springs of wealth PAGE 24 24 24 25 26 28 29 § 2. The Waste of Producers' Work Our few adult male producers . The manufacture of competitive materials How printing is wasted The uses of advertisement An illustration from the boot trade Competitive tea and butter The rubbish industry 29 30 31 31 32 33 33 34 § 3. Science has Solved the Problem of Poverty Plenty has been placed at our disposal Modern facility of production . Not difficult to make but difficult to sell How capitalists deny customers to each other The blind alley of useful work Few reap the full frmt of inventions . 36 36 37 38 39 41 42 § 4. The State Organized for Work . 43 The mischief of industrial condottieri ... 43 Liberty and the reign of order ... 44 The path to honourable work and honourable ease . 45 Possibility of a short working day . . . 45 The organised work of The Great State . • 46 The educated youth ..... 46 The induction into work. .... 50 The present lack of freedom and opportunity . 50 The professional who is also an amateur . . 51 Twenty-six million workers between eighteen and sixty- five years of age ..... 61 CONTENTS XI The conception of The Great State Amateur work in The Great State The pubUcation of news and of opinion An honourable conscription for the mines No more of toil in a single groove Collective saving .... The increase of really personal propert3'' The abstirdity of property in impersonal things The mutation of industrial processes . Economic independence for women John Stuart Mill on concentration of industry . The American Steel Trust's gigantic undertaking Of so-called "natural monopolies" The railway and its enforced economy . Economic consolidation simplifies work How the simplicity of the Post Ofiico is achieved American investigation of waste in flour distribution An illustration from the carpet trade . Waste in agricultural distribution How we play with imported wool Simplifying external trade The struggle with Nature demands all Man's energies PAGE 51 52 54 57 68 58 59 60 60 61 62 63 65 67 68 69 70 75 78 79 80 82 III. CAPITAL AND IDEAS The assimiption that capital is productive Professor Taussig on the alleged productiveness of capital ..... Railway versus packhorse and wagon . Ideas are productive, not the capital which embodies them ...... Capital cannot be conserved The physical properties of capital Organic reproduction and men's work . Reproduction of inorganic embodiments of ideas Whose is the fruit of genius ? . The nation independent of private capitalists. 84 84 85 86 86 88 89 90 90 91 92 IV. LAND IN RELATION WEALTH . TO BRITISH The wealth of modern Britain not based upon land Coal and British wealth .... 93 § 1. Land and the Industrial Revolution 93 03 94 Xll CONTENTS Agricultural work and wealth . The coining of the Industrial Revolution Power and the spade We produce one-half of the food we eat The advance of urban populations throughout the world The real decline in male agricultural employment Check to the rural decline The chief cause of rural depopulation . The limits of British agricultiiral development British land poor in materials . The small amount of land needed for industry § 2. Space and Health . The Industrial Revolution cannot be reversed Industrial workers must have space The conditions of locomotion The little land wanted for healthy life How we might save an army of lives every year . The need for extension of public ownership of land Land and Housing Commissioners suggested . The housing question a capital question Civilised man needs access to capital . V. THE COMMON ACCUSATION The check on the programme girl The poor wages of theatre attendants The case of the lavatory attendant The free use of the cash register Audited and found correct The common accusation an indictment of our society VI. THE LADDER . The conception of the Educational Ladder The sublimation of the bright boys Release from manual labour as an ambition The lottery of the ladder Every child should be fully trained The boys who are trained to be serfs The growing perils of ignorance A " great broad track " for all . CONTENTS VII. THE RURAL WAGE § 1. Rural Wages as They Are Agricultxire in perspective The rise in agricultural wages . Agricultural earnings in 1907 How agricultural wages vary How coal-beised industry has affected agricultural wages Xlll PAGE 137 137 137 138 140 141 143 § 2. Rural Wages in Relation to Prices 146 Our prices governed by imports of oversea supplies . 146 Agricultural wages vary in spite of the general level of food prices . . . . . .147 Corn prices compared with agricultural wages . . 148 Agricultural wages independent of the price of food . 148 An unanswerable case for a minimum wage . . 151 § 3. Wages and Efficiency . . . 152 Effect of increased wages upon the wage-earners . 152 Cheap labour is dear labour . . . .153 The Lancashire cotton trade . . . .154 Wages as an element in price . . . .155 Wages in their effect upon the employer . . 157 The effect of factory legislation. . . .158 High wage trades the most efficient trades . . 158 The Railways Act of 1913 . . . . 159 The scientific future of agriculture . . . 161 § 4. A Minimum Wage in Agriculture . 162 Great variation in local conditions . . .162 Time work and piece work . . . .164 Some illustrations of varying conditions . . 164 Wage Boards a suitable machinery . . .165 Difficulties already surmounted by Wage Boards . 166 The principle of the Trade Boards Act should be applied 1 68 How Wage Boards would work . . .169 District or County Boards necessary . . .170 There should be a national physiological minimum . 171 Wages and Parliament . . , . .172 XIV CONTENTS VIII. THE MINIMUM WAGE IN PRACTICE 174 § 1. The Trade Boards Act of 1909 . . 174 Sir Charles Dilke and the Home- Work Committee of 1 907 174 Legislation in respect of wages " exceptionally low " . 176 Constitution of the Trade Boards . . . 176 Application to tailoring, box-making, lace-finishing, and hand chain-making . . . .177 The Lace-finishing Board . . . .178 The Chain Board . . . . . .178 The minimum wages established . . . 178 § 2. What the Act has Accomplished . 179 How earnings have risen at Cradley Heath . . 180 The Cradley Heath lock-out . . . .180 Difficulties of the Nottingham lace-finishing trade . 182 Paper-box conditions . . . . .184 The wholesale tailoring minimiim , . .185 The case of the slow or ageing worker . . 186 Two hundred thousand workers benefited . . 187 § 8. The Extension of 1913 . . . 187 Confectionery, shirt-making, hollow- ware, and linen and cotton embroidery trades scheduled in 1913 . 187 The failure to add calendering . . . .188 Poor wages of the women ironers . . .189 Wages in the confectionery trades . . .190 The poor rates paid for shirt-making . . .190 The sweating at Belfast . . . .192 The need for further extension of the Act . . 193 IX. THE NEW DEARNESS § 1. Variation of Prices since the Eigh teen-Seventies The rise of prices in the last half-generation A world-wide phenomenon The new dearness in relation to protection The low level of 1896 . Wholesale prices, 1871-1912 195 195 195 195 196 197 198 CONTENTS XV PAGE § 2. The Gold Supply and Gold Prices 200 The supply of the medium of exchange and its effect upon price ...... 200 Prices and gold output since 1871 . . . 202 The gold supply as a factor .... 204 The Board of Trade price numbers examined . 204 Price variations of certain commodities . . 205 Commerce mainly conducted with credit instruments . 207 New gold and the world's stock of gold . . 208 The velocity of exchange of money . . . 209 The world's gold output, our gold imports and bankers' clearances compared . . . ,210 Increased industrial consumption of gold . . 210 It is clear that the supply of gold has not been the main factor of causation . . . .211 § 3. Why Prices have Risen . .211 Why prices fell in the eighteen-eighties and the eighteen- nineties . . . . . .211 The creaming of the world's supplies . . . 212 The modern large-scale world-exploitation . .212 The rapid increase of demand for primary commodities 213 How demand overtook supply . . . .213 The future of price . . . . .214 Science will probably produce an endxiring cheapness . 215 X. THE ROAD TO RUIN . § 1. Notes on the Rake's Progress Down the steep path . . . . .216 Our Jeremiahs and the facts of the case . . . 217 The recent improvement in the labour market . . 219 The rise of gross assessments to Income Tax . . 221 British exports 1895-1913 . . . .222 The calm close of the great trade boom of 1912-13 . 223 Increase of national expenditure in nine years . . 224 Growth of national expenditure contrasted with growth of taxed incomes . . . . .226 Why the aged poor waited so long for pensions . 227 The growth of expenditure of six great countries . 229 National expenditure has everywhere increased of late years ....... 230 216 216 XVI CONTENTS § 2. Towards a Sense of Proportion The main increase in our expenditure has been upon Social Reform ..... Army expenditure has been stationary . British naval expenditure for eleven years How the rise in prices has affected naval costs . Are our defences beyond our means ? . Our expenditure on motor vehicles and battleships . Some striking comparisons .... The scale of our affairs ..... The small affairs of a great people are large in the The cost of a starvation diet for forty-six million people The cost of housing nine million families The cost of improving education PA6B 231 231 231 232 233 234 235 235 236 237 239 240 240 § 3. National Expenditure and Economic Stability .... The sad case of our poor taxpayers Some typical income-tax burdens Peace, Retrenchment, and Reform Keeping the Government poor . How distress accompanied a starved revenue . Taxation has not touched the fringe of luxurious ex penditure ..... Increased national expenditure has made for economic stability ..... 241 241 242 243 244 245 246 247 XI. TARIFF REFORM— TEN YEARS AFTER § 1. Mr. Chamberlain's Case and the Accomplished Facts The suggested bargaining with the Colonies . Lineal descent from mercantilism Why food was to be taxed The concrete proposals of 1903 Small but costly taxes .... Our increasing wheat imports from the Colonies Record of the tlireatened industries The insuperable difficulty of distinguishing between materials and manufactures 248 248 249 249 250 251 252 255 257 261 CONTENTS xvii § 2. The Later Developments of Tariff Reform ...... 262 Britain's two great gifts . . . • .262 A common tariff impossible for the British Empire . 263 Free Trade the only possible fiscal basis for a British Imperial Union . . . • .264 How the Tariff " Commission " dealt with Mr. Chamber- lain's food programme . . . .265 Sir Edward Carson on the taxation of Colonial products 265 The shifting policy of Tarifi Reformers . . 268 The desertion of the British farmer . . . 271 The Edinburgh programme of January 1913 . . 271 Contradictory ofiers to the Colonies and to the British workmen ...... 273 Value of Free Trade to the British Empire . .274 XII. THE SINGLE TAX . . . .276 § 1. The Single Tax Statistically Im- possible ..... 276 The theory that the land of a coimtry is the sole source of its wealth ..... 276 Quesnay the physiocrat could not foresee the Industrial Revolution . . . . . .277 The estimate of British land rents . . . 279 The Single Taxers' exaggeration of British land values 280 Rent compared with the National Income , . 282 Analysis of property passing at death in 1912 . 283 § 2. Some General Considerations . 284 What British wealth is built on . . .284 British land yields little .... 285 Why British agricultural rents are low . . 286 The taxation of Land Values . . . .287 Taxing the wrong people .... 288 Hard ceise of mortgagors under the Single Tax . 289 The Single Tax the enemy of city amenities . . 290 Application to Local Taxation .... 291 Untaxing improvements . . . .292 The Single Tax and the use of land . . .293 The Single Tax would not cheapen land . . 294 Henry George on the Single Tax ideal . . 294 INDEX 297 b THE FUTURE OF WORK POVERTY OF PRODUCTION § 1. The Frustration of Production VI ^E commonly entertain such exagger- ^ ated ideas of the production of wealth in our time that it is difficult to realise that the truth about a modern industrial State is that, although it has been armed by Science with extraordinary powers of production, it produces little. The little that is produced is distributed very unequally, and the net result is a community of poor people veneered with a thin layer of the well-to-do. To make this statement complete as a broad generalisa- tion of the facts, it is necessary to add that no small proportion of what production there is consists either of rubbish or of things that had better not be made. The results of the first British Census of Production, made in accordance with the 1 2 POVERTY OF PRODUCTION provisions of the timid and inadequate Census of Production Act of 1906, enable us to state the condition of British production in almost precise terms. Agriculture was specifically excluded from the Census of Production Act, but the Board of Agriculture made a voluntary census of the agricultural output for the year 1908, and the work was done so well that we are able to add its results with some con- fidence to the aggregates of the compulsory Production Census. Fortunately, in calculating the value of the production of British mines, mills, factories, and workshops, the Board of Trade, in carry- ing out the Census work, gave us not merely the gross value of the products of each trade. The gross value of the production of any industry is not due entirely to the efforts of that industry. Materials are bought and worked upon, and what any industry adds to the wealth of the country is truly to be tested, not by the value of its output, but by the value which it adds to the materials which it uses. This value, the Board of Trade, in their report on the Census of Pro- duction, term the " net output." If this net output had not been ascertained for each trade, it is obvious that there would be a very large element of duplication in the totals FRUSTRATION OF PRODUCTION 3 arrived at. If we took the gross outputs of all our industries and added them together, we should be valuing many elements of pro- duction over and over again. Take coal as an example. The value of coal produced from British mines appears in the Census first under Coal. Some of this coal is used to smelt iron, and the value of this coal, therefore, again appears as Iron. The iron becomes a finished iron product, and the coal value appears again, perhaps more than once. One of these products, say a boiler plate, may again appear in the value of Ships. So £l worth of coal may appear twice, thrice, or more times if we simply make an aggregate of the gross productions of all industries. By obtaining the " net product " of each industry, however, the element of duplica- tion is entirely avoided. The Board of Trade ascertained that the firms making returns had a gross output averaged at £1,765,366,000. The firms having these outputs, however, used materials valued at £1,028,346,000, and they gave work out to other firms valued at £24,885,000. The net industrial output of the United Kingdom, therefore, as revealed by the Census of Pro- duction, amounted to £712,135,000. It is well to set out here the particulars for each 4 POVERTY OF PRODUCTION of the great groups of trades as analysed by the Census : United Kingdom Industrial Output, 1907 (1) (2) (3) Group of Trades. Gross Output Materials Used Net Output : Factory Value. and Work Given Ool. (1) minus Out. Ool. (2). £ £ £ Mines and Quarries 148,026,000 28,495,000 119,531,000 Iron and Steel, Engi- neering and Ship- building 375,196,000 222,114,000 153,082,000 Metal Trades 93,465,000 81,572,000 11,893,000 Textile Trades . 333,561,000 239,227,000 94,334,000 Clothing Trades . 107,983,000 60,310,000 47,673,000 Food, Drink and Tobacco 287,446,000 197,932,000 89,514,000 Chemical and Allied Trades . 75,032,000 53,475,000 21,557,000 Paper, Printing and Stationery 61,308,000 27,658,000 33,650,000 Leather, Canvas and Indiarubber 34,928,000 26,310,000 8,618,000 Timber Trades , 46,390,000 24,946,000 21,444,000 C lay. Stone, Building, and Contracting Trades . 116,692,000 56,236,000 60,456,000 Miscellaneous Trades . 8,288,000 3,845,000 4,443,000 Public Utility Services 77,051,000 31,111,000 45,940,000 TOTAI, . £1,765,366,000 £1,053,231,000 £712,135,000 It will be seen that of the total £712,135,000, as much as £119,531,000 is the net output of mining and quarrying, chiefly, of course, coal mining. Apart from mining and quarrying, therefore, the net output of British industries in 1907 was worth £592,604,000. It is a small total for a nation of 46,000,000 people. Is it complete ? The answer is that it is so nearly FRUSTRATION OF PRODUCTION 5 complete that the Board of Trade think £50,000,000 a sufficient estimate of the out- put of about 1,000,000 industrial workers excluded from the Census chiefly because they were working on their own account. Now for Agriculture. The Board of Agriculture and Fisheries estimate, as the result of their inquiries, that in 1908 the produce of British agriculture was worth £210,000,000 at points of production, made up as follows : United Kingdom Agricultural Production Value at Farms. Food and Fodder Products, Flowers, Seeds and Plants Horses and animals not for food Hides and Skins Wool Timber Flax Total 195,700,000 3,400,000 6,000,000 3,600,000 900,000 400,000 £210,000,000 In this total of £210,000,000 all duplication is avoided. The United Kingdom is con- sidered as one farm. For example, when turnips are not sold off a farm, but eaten by animals and turned into meat or milk, the value of the turnips appears in the value of the meat or milk. As to British fisheries, the yearly output is estimated at about £12,000,000. We get, therefore, as the aggre- 6 POVERTY OF PRODUCTION gate of British production of all kinds for 1907, the following round figures : Bbitish Material Pkoduction in 1907 Net Output. £ £ Mines and Quarries . . . 120,000,000 Manufactures : (a) Making retTirns 592,000,000 (6) Estimated pro- duction of those not making returns . 50,000,000 642,000,000 Agriculture (1908) . , . 210,000,000 Fisheries 12,000,000 Total . . . £984,000,000 Such was the extent of British material production in 1907. The net product was £984,000,000, and if we add the value of im- ported materials used by manufacturers, and the manufacturers' costs of obtaining those materials, we arrive at about £1,450,000,000 as the value of material commodities at points of production in 1907. A considerable pro- portion of this was exported, and a certain amount of stuff ready for consumption was imported. If we desire to ascertain what was the net gain in material wealth of the United Kingdom in 1907, we have to consider the net output figures in relation to imports and exports, and we get the following result: FRUSTRATION OF PRODUCTION 7 United Kingdom Increment of Material Wealth in 1907 £ Net Material Production as given in last table .... 984,000,000 Add Imports into United Kingdom 646,000,000 1,630,000,000 Subtract : £ ( 1 ) Exports of Bri- tish production 426,000,000 (2) Exports of im- ported goods 92,000,000 518,000,000 Result : Net gain of material wealth in 1907 . . .£1,112,000,000 Thus, at " place of production " prices, before the host of distributive agents largely raised the values by some necessary and much unnecessary work, the material commodities gained by the work of a population which in 1907 numbered 44,000,000, amounted to no more than £1,112,000,000, or just over £25 per head of the population. We see very clearly that, unequal as the distribution of wealth actually is, British poverty is by no means a matter of ill-distribution alone. To leave out of account the important factor that no small part of this material income is needed for public and not for individual purposes, if we imagine the £1,112,000,000 worth of commodities divided equally amongst our forty- six millions of people, it would not suffice to give good food and good clothing 8 POVERTY OF PRODUCTION and good housing, to say nothing of the materials of amusement, of sport, of culture, and of travel. It is only too clear that we have not yet attained to a degree of pro- duction large enough to confer more than a very modest standard of comfort upon our great population. We have just enough to abolish poverty in its worst sense. The figure quoted is not, of course, the same thing as the figure representing the aggregate of the incomes of the individuals composing the United Kingdom. The aggregate of in- comes is about twice as great as the total we have just considered — the National Dividend is certainly not less than £2,100,000,000 in 1914 — but it is made up of the valuation, not only of material things, but of all sorts and kinds of services, useful and useless, social and anti-social. It includes, of course, the extraordinary costs of distribution, amounting to £400,000,000-£500,000,000, which stand between producer and consumer, and are so considerable an element in the causation of poverty. ENUMERATION OF PRODUCERS 9 § 2. Enumeration of Producers Let us pass from the production to the persons who produce. The facts relating to employment revealed by the Census of Pro- duction have not yet received the attention which is their due, and we shall do well to look at them closely. The employment figures revealed by the Production Census are very much more valuable than those of the Popula- tion Census. We have not yet an analysis of the Census of 1911 for the three Kingdoms, but if we had, we should not have such valu- able material before us as that which is yielded by the inquiry under examination. When persons are asked to name their occupation for the purpose of a population Census, we obtain a considerable proportion of worthless replies. People past work, and indeed no longer working, often describe themselves as following their old occupations. Those un- employed, those sick or injured, are also in- cluded as workers at work. The Census of Production, on the other hand, gives us the number of persons actually at work. It is not quite complete, for the reason already stated, and the Board of Trade estimate that about 1,000,000 persons — persons working on 10 POVERTY OF PRODUCTION their own account, and so forth — were not included in the employers' schedules. The actual returns showed that in 1907 the firms reporting employed as nearly as possible 7,000,000 people, of whom about 6,500,000 were wage-earners and about 500,000 salaried persons. To these, as already noted, we have to add 1,000,000 for the unscheduled. It remains to consider agriculture. Including the " occupiers " themselves, some of them farmers and farmers' relatives stated to be assisting in production, the Board of Agri- culture's returns show that the United Kingdom has about 2,800,000 persons of both sexes engaged in agriculture. It is indisputable, however, that a certain proportion of the " occupiers " are by no means following agri- culture as their profession, and as to the relatives, and especially the female relatives, returned as working on the farms, the return of a unit does not, in a large number of cases, represent a constant and regular producer. It is probable, therefore, that 2,500,000 is a liberal estimate of the number of persons actually and regularly engaged in agricultural production. The total number of producers in the United Kingdom in 1907 was therefore roundly as follows (neglecting fishermen, whose numbers are relatively small) : ENUMERATION OF PRODUCERS 11 British Producers (Direct Producers of Material Commodities) circa 1907 Persons employed in Industry and included in Schedules . . . 7,000,000 Do., not included in Schedules . 1,000,000 Do., employed in Agriculture, includ- ing Farmers .... 2,500,000 Totai, . . . 10,500,000 Such is the number of men, women, boys, and girls engaged in material production in the United Kingdom. To judge by the Census of 1901, and the subsequent increase of population, we have about 20,000,000 persons of all sexes and ages who, in Census terminology, are engaged in occupations for gain. Therefore, about one-half of our occu- pied population is engaged in material pro- duction. It is a thing most remarkable. I do not lose sight of the fact that of the balance of rather less than 10,000,000 persons who are not engaged in material production, a certain proportion is usefully employed in contributing indirectly to production. Indeed, the railway man who helps to move a manu- factured article from Coventry to London is as much a producer of wealth as a mechanic engaged in a motor-car works at Coventry. But when we make every allowance for such considerations, it remains most significant that one-half of the British population working 12 POVERTY OF PRODUCTION for gain is divorced from direct material production. And when we analyse the 10,500,000 who are direct producers, the number looks even more unsatisfactory. It will be remembered that 1,000,000 of them consist of an estimate of the mostly inefficient people not included in the schedules, so that we have 9,500,000 scheduled persons to subject to analysis. Of these, 2,500,000 are agricultural workers, and chiefly adults. The 7,000,000 industrial workers are made up, in round figures, as follows : United Kingdom Industriaii Employment in 1907 Wage Earners : Males aged 18 years and upward 4,250,000 Females aged 18 years and upward 1,200,000 Boys and girls under 18 . . 950,000 Out-workers, chiefly women . 100,000 6,500,000 Salaried Persons .... 500,000 ToTAi, . . . 7,000,000 We see, therefore, that in our great popu- lation — which, in 1914, is about 46,000,000, and which in 1907 was as nearly as possible 44,000,000 (observe in passing how emigra- tion has reduced the rate of increase of our population) — there were in 1907 only 4,250,000 men, counting as a " man " a male person ENUMERATION OF PRODUCERS 13 aged eighteen years and over, engaged in mining or quarrying or manufacturing, and of these about one million are miners and quarrymen. Our male population eighteen years of age and upwards numbered about 13,000,000. So we get the striking fact that of our male popu- lation aged eighteen years and over, only about one in three is engaged directly in producing industrial wealth. The fact that 7,000,000 industrial workers have a net output of no more than £700,000,000 or so has been eagerly seized upon by those who oppose the aspirations of Labour. We find them dividing £700,000,000 by 7,000,000 to arrive at the brilliant if simple conclusion that the net output per British industrial worker is no more than £100. Further, it is pointed out, the £100 per worker per head is the total sum out of which has to be paid not only the remuneration of the worker, but the remuneration of every other interest con- cerned. Rent, interest, profit, etc., all have to come out of the £100. And so you arrive at the mournful conclusion that the payment of even a thirty-shillings minimum wage is in practice impossible. But the 7,000,000 workers do not consist of men only. Mr. A. W. Flux, the Director of the Census of Production, has made a 14 POVERTY OF PRODUCTION classification of the 6,500,000 manual workers, and here it is : Analysis op Net OtrrpuTS in Relation to Sex and Age Average Net Output per Head. A. Men (Males over 18). B. ■Women, Boys and Girla. Under £50 £50— £75 . £75— £100 . £100— £125 £125— £150 £150— £175 £175— £200 £200 and over 9,481 511,915 1,337,898 1,055,742 831,132 65,092 138,635 230,963 23,132 996,412 806,338 297,749 84,159 '50,373 26,195 13,578 4,180,858 2,297,936 We see that the £100 per worker is the average of many inequalities. Take the first line : trades in which the net output is under £50. The people working in it are 23,132 women, boys, and girls, and only 9,481 men. Or look at the next line : output £50 and under £75. Here we find the number of men (males over eighteen) only 511,915, whereas the women, boys, and girls amount to nearly 1,000,000. Even in the next line, output £75 and under £100, there are no less than 806,338 women, boys, and girls, against a little over 1,300,000 men. As soon as we get over the £100 point we see that the men are in the majority. So ENUMERATION OF PRODUCERS 15 that the net output of adult male industrial workers in this country is much over £100, although we do not know precisely what it is. There is thus nothing in the results of the Census of Production that leads us to believe that a much greater remuneration for labour is not possible, even with production as it is. But it is the essence of the theory of high wages that they lead to a better production through improving the efficiency of both master and man, and through enlarging markets by increasing purchasing power, and this even in a competitive society. That is to say, workmen ought to get more than they do out of the existing production — the frustrated production of competitive industry. That is a question quite apart from what they might receive under a system of orderly, scientific production. § 3. British Homes and their Furnishings If analysis shows British production to be small, and the number of persons engaged directly in the production of material com- modities to be inadequate, what appears when 16 POVERTY OF PRODUCTION we relate the production of any industry to the needs of our population ? Let me illus- trate this important point by reference to two trades of the first importance, the first the building and repairing of the homes of the people, the second the furnishing of the homes of the people. As to these we can get a great deal of light from the Census of Pro- duction. We find that in 1907, which, it will be remembered, was a " boom " year, the pro- duction or repair of buildings of all sorts, whether private residences or trade or business premises, amounted to £73,000,000. Further analysis shows that this £73,000,000 was made up as follows : Construction of new buildings, about £44,000,000 ; Alteration and repair of existing buildings, about £29,000,000. Let us consider these figures in relation to the needs of the nation. First let us consider the expenditure upon alterations and repairs — £29,000,000. This is all that was spent in 1907 upon the alteration, repair, and redecoration of over 9,000,000 private houses and trade premises, including mills, factories, warehouses, shops, etc. It covers all the many trades concerned with alterations and repairs, including painting, whitewashing, paperhanging, plumbing, etc. BRITISH HOMES 17 The average bill for repair and redecoration for each building was little more than £3, and those who have had the pleasure of encounter- ing bills of the kind will know how little of such work is covered by £3. If we did not know the houses and trade premises of the United Kingdom, we could gather from these figures that our 9,000,000 buildings cannot be in very good repair, and observation of houses as they are confirms only too closely the results of the Production Census. The remainder of the aggregate, £44,000,000, represents new building construction, and it comes to less than 195. per head of the population. This sum was not spent upon new private dwelling-houses. We have again to remind ourselves that it covers every sort and kind of premises, whether used for private or public purposes, or for trade or industry. It is not too much to say that our great towns contain tens of miles of filthy brickwork ripe for demolition. Some tenement houses recently tumbled down in Dublin and killed some of their unfortunate inhabitants. It is not long since a great London railway-terminus fell to pieces like a house of cards. It can only be said that it is surprising that such things do not happen more frequently, when we think of the condition of many of our 2 18 POVERTY OF PRODUCTION railway-stations, trade premises, and dirty tenement houses. All that we are doing to eradicate the houses which kill tens of thou- sands of our people every year, and which deprive hundreds of thousands of health, is to advance to a better condition of housing at the rate of an expenditure represented by 195. per head per annum, that sum covering every sort and kind of new building. The probable expenditure on new dwelling-houses is Ss. or 9s. per annum per head of the popu- lation ! It will help us to form an idea of the in- adequacy of the present rate of re-building if we consider what it would cost if we built only 200,000 new houses every year. Let us imagine that we spent upon them £400 apiece — a sum which goes a very little way in giving comfort to a family. Yet 200,000 houses at £400 each comes to £80,000,000, and we are spending as little as £44,000,000 a year upon every sort and kind of new building. Hard upon the publication of the Final Report of the Census of Production of 1907 followed the first Report upon Unemploy- ment Insurance. What did it show us ? It showed that the Government actuary who drew up the estimate of the number of BRITISH HOMES 19 builders' men who would come within the provisions of the Unemployment Section of the National Insurance Act, working, as he had to work, upon the latest Census avail- able to him — that of 1901 — estimated that 1,321,000 persons would be compulsorily in- sured as belonging to the group of building trades. The estimate was for 1912. The actual results of the working of the Act show that in 1913, instead of there being 1,321,000 builders, there were 1,109,953. So that, re- latively to population, the number of builders has been falling off, which means in relation to population a decrease of production of material commodities of an especially im- portant kind. I pass from houses to the contents of houses. The Census of Production shows us what the United Kingdom produces by way of an addition to the stock of furniture. The schedules received from the factories and workshops making furniture, house furnish- ings, office and shop fittings, bedding, cabinet and upholstery work, etc., show that the output in 1907 of finished articles of this kind was as shown on the following page. There is not a great import or export trade in furniture, and broadly we may take what imports and exports there are to balance each ERTY OF PRODUCTION other and consider the figure given as repre- senting the consumption of furniture in the United Kingdom in 1907 at wholesale prices. Retail prices would be about one-third higher. The production of furniture is seen to be as inadequate as, or more inadequate than, the production of houses. Of wooden furni- ture the factory value of the output was no Furniture, House Furnishings, and Upholstery Production in 1907 £ Furnitiire of wood, upholstered or not . 7,449,000 House furnishings not elsewhere specified 6,027,000 Bedding, cushions, etc. . . . 1,471,000 Fittings forshops, offices, banks, churches, ships, etc 1,126,000 Blinds 554,000 Wire mattresses .... 161,000 Bamboo, basket, and wicker furniture (including perambulators) . . 90,000 other products not furnitiu-e or furnisliings 158,000 Total VALUE OF ABOVE . , £17,036,000 more than £7,500,000— say £9,000,000 retail value — and this poor amount of stuff was all that was commanded by about 44,000,000 people. It comes to about 45. per head per annum, or a little more than £l per family. We see that what ought to be a magnificent trade — a trade of dimensions large enough to employ an army of skilled workmen — is in fact a small and struggling industry. A great deal of the furniture which is made is rubbish. I took the trouble to BRITISH HOMES 21 go round a recent Furniture Exhibition at Olympia, and I can only describe the impres- sion the stuff made upon my mind as painful. The greater part of the exhibits consisted of vulgar trash. There can be no doubt that the wooden furniture total would be far less than it is but for the practice of the hire system, which enables poor people to acquire rubbish at a high price from what are, in effect, money- lenders. The examples I have given could be multi- plied a hundredfold. It is possible to demon- strate in relation to almost every sort and kind of manufactured commodity that industry has not yet learned how to supply a great nation with an adequate supply of material things. The home market is everywhere re- vealed as a thing of small dimensions, which it needs but a very small production to glut. It is a great reproach to our civilisation and to our organisation for work that the great ideas of the inventors, and the magni- ficent endowment which modern science has bestowed upon us, yields so little. It is clearly not the fault of industrial powers per se. The powers exist. Mankind possesses to-day an extraordinary command of the forces of Nature. We are no longer the helpless crea- tures we were 150 years ago. Then, poverty 22 POVERTY OF PRODUCTION was a natural poverty, for men had necessarily to earn their bread by the sweat of their brows and to devote themselves almost entirely to work upon the land, done without the assist- ance of any but primitive instruments. That is not our case to-day. Agriculture no longer demands the arduous labour of the majority of men in a white civilisation, and the labours of the majority are set free to apply scientific methods to materials to produce the numer- ous commodities which lift Man above the condition of the agricultural hind. Those who advance proposals for the better ordering of the affairs of a State, are usually met with the cry, " You would destroy the production of wealth ; you would pull down the magnificent edifice which has been built up." The truth is that it is the commercial system, and not any new proposal, which is on its defence. What Commercialism has to answer is this : " What have you done with the ideas of great men ; what have you accom- plished with the weapons of Science ; what have you to show in actual, practical pro- duction in 1914, 145 years after James Watt took out his steam-engine patent, 85 years after George Stephenson ran his ' Rocket ' in the Rainhill competition, 82 years after Faraday discovered magneto-electric indue- BRITISH HOMES 23 tion ? " The critic possessing knowledge of the magnificent aids to production now placed freely in the hands of the commercial man (I say freely, for the great mass of ideas is unprotected by patents, and in any case the term of a patent is usually fourteen years) is entitled to demand an explanation of the results of the Census of Production. He asserts that the record is one not of success, but of ignominious failure ; he alleges that a nation organised for work could, wielding the weapons of Science, produce much more wealth with much less labour, and the grava- men of his charge against commercialism is that since man possesses the means of adequate wealth production, poverty has become a crime. II THE FUTURE OF WORK § 1. The Divorcing of Wealth and Work TT was a wise old woman who sat her down in Cheapside and waited for the crowd to go by. To the average London citizen she is a perfect picture of the ill-informed, rural intelligence. To the man who understands, she had good cause to contemplate the stream of passers-by with amazement, and to expect it to cease. What, indeed, are all the people doing who may be seen thronging the streets of the City of London ? It is not difficult to answer this question in a negative sense. Observation shows us that, almost in its entirety, the ceaselessly moving City crowd is composed of non-producers. The centre of London is fed from about 7.30 a.m., the hour at which workmen's trains cease to run, until about 11 o'clock, with tens of thousands of men and women, and boys and girls, who are not merely non-producers, but persons who could not give you an intelligent 24 WEALTH AND WORK 25 idea as to how any useful material thing is made. Whether our point of observation be the Mansion House, or the top of Ludgate Hill, or westwards at the Marble Arch, it is rarely that there pass before the vision the dirty clothes which, in England, we are un- happily accustomed to regard as the proper costume of a working man. We are in a land of " officials," where an enormous number of people are traffickers in material commodities, who eat without sowing or reaping, who dress without spinning or weaving, who house themselves without building or planning. From merchant to clerk, from shopkeeper to girl typist, from stockbroker to commission agent, from banker to office boy, from lawyer to doorkeeper, it is a land in which an army of people consumes without producing. Traced homewards, the individuals who form the City stream may be foimd living in places widely remote, from rows of little houses in Tooting or W^althamstow, to expen- sive and hardly less ugly red-brick villas in Hendon or Woking, in Hampstead or Surbiton. There spending the big and little incomes which they gain by non-productive work, they support by their expenditure, to build and repair their homes, to sustain and beautify their persons, a very large proportion of the 26 THE FUTURE OF WORK inhabitants of London, and of Greater London, and of the places immediately beyond. Not all the latter are non-producers. Apart from the shopkeepers and their assistants, and the menial servants, there are brought into the economic chain a considerable number of nominally useful producers who spend their work at the bidding of the non-producers who traffic at the centre. The result, in large, is to bring into the Metropolis and its surroundings imports of material commodities which have been either created in those parts of the country where men work usefully, or which have been gained by commerce from abroad. It is not for- gotten that London is itself a manufacturing centre — are not even food factories to be found in the filthy abysses of the East ? — but the matter may be put in true perspective by pointing out that the London County Council area contains only 387,000 manual workers in a population of 4,523,000. It is a far cry from the place of central traffic and private officialdom to the springs of British wealth. British prosperity is built upon the possession of one of the greatest and richest coal areas in the world, and the British coal mines are not situate near London. They are to be found in the West, and in the Mid- WEALTH AND WORK 27 lands, and in the North. Curiously, there are not so many red-brick villas near the springs of work as there are near the centres of mere traffic. You shall seek in vain in Cardiff or in Newcastle for endless streams of real and imitation swells. Mean and sordid, even as measured by the standard of a sordid Metropolis, are the highways and byways of the places from which flow the mineral streams which have done so much for Britain. It was the unlocking of the British coal seams which made modern Britain — which in a period of a century and a half changed a small, poor, backward and stagnant nation into a great manufacturing State, with a population whose capital and its immediate environs to-day contain a larger population than that of the whole of England and Wales in the middle of the eighteenth century. The use of coal having entirely changed the char- acter of British industry and trade, and made the United Kingdom great and in the ordinary sense prosperous, it might be imagined that the lesson would be so surely learned, especially seeing that coal-getting is arduous and exceed- ingly dangerous, that mining would rank amongst the most honoured of callings, and that mining districts would flow with the milk and honey bestowed by a grateful people upon 28 THE FUTURE OF WORK the indispensable creators of wealth. In reality, the mining districts of the United Kingdom are devoid of every trace of beauty, and of nearly every rational means of happi- ness. Take, for example, the unique South Wales coalfield, and its unhappy valleys. Perched on the hillsides, in close contiguity to the pit head, gloomy rows of uncomfortable boxes shelter those who work and die to pro- duce a little for themselves and a great deal for the soft-handed ones who dwell afar off. Once-smiling valleys have been shorn of every natural attribute and changed into pande- moniums of work and pain. Even a mining manager in one of these little Welsh villages — and how few can hope to rise to become mining managers — lives in a small and obscure house where the delight of a garden is unknown. So melancholy is the impression created by these places that one discovers almost with surprise that the people have not lost their gift of song. Wherever the coal is found, whether it be in Scotland, or in the Black Country, or in Yorkshire, or in Northumberland, or in Lanca- shire, there also the greater part of useful British industrial work is done, and there also, strangely, are to be found the chief evidences of an all-pervading poverty. The nearer the WEALTH AND WORK 29 source of wealth, the nearer the abodes of squalor. The nearer to honourable, useful, and necessary labour, the nearer to desolation. Who that has seen the purlieus of our industrial towns, and who understands that these are the places where the greater part of the material wealth of the country is created, can fail to wonder why so few commodities remain with those whose life is spent in productive labour ? It would astonish me to learn that the majority of the readers of these words reached this point without feeling an ardent desire to remind the author of the fact that a man or woman who does not work with his hands, in the direct production of material commo- dities, is not necessarily a non-producer. I therefore hasten to add that I am very familiar with the fact, and with all that has been said about it by the long line of economists, and that I shall discuss it hereafter. § 2. The Waste of Producers' Work Because so many of us are wasting our time, the material production of the United King- dom is not large enough, even if equally 30 THE FUTURE OF WORK distributed, to redeem us from poverty. In the mean state that is, the waste of work is so grievous that it is but the minority of the working population which is engaged in material production, and even as to that minority it is most unhappily true that it is largely engaged in making material things which ought not to be produced at all — things which the Great State of our dreams would ban as economic indecencies. We have seen, in our study of poverty of production, how small a crop is at present produced by commerce from the seed furnished by science, and that in 1907 our great popula- tion included only 4,250,000 men (counting as a '' man " a male aged eighteen years and upwards) devoted directly to mining or manu- facturing. We must not readily conclude, however, that we have even as many as 4,250,000 men engaged in useful industrial production. For one thing, the Census of Production was taken in an exceedingly good year of trade, when employment was good. If it had been taken in the following year, the number of producers would have been shown as about 4 per cent, less than the above figure. We have also to take account of short time, and of the operation of industrial disease and WASTE OF PRODUCERS* WORK 31 accident, which cuts deeply into the available working time of industrial workers. But these considerations, important as they are, pale before the waste of work which is involved in industrial processes v/hich are but the servants of unnecessary competition. Analysis of the work of the few millions of industrial producers shows us that no small part of them are engaged, not in the manu- facture of things of personal utility, but in the manufacture of articles or commodities which merely serve the purposes of competitive selling. Take the printing trade, for example. An unmeasurable, but certainly large proportion of the men, women, boys, and girls who rank in the Census of Production as working in the printing trades, are engaged in printing, not books, or newspapers, or magazines, but advertising matter, competitive price lists, wrappers, trade labels, bill-heads, account books, posters, etc., which are merely called into existence in the struggle of various com- petitive sellers to reach the consumer. The consumer has to pay the bill for all this print- ing in the price of the competitive articles which he buys, but what does he gain by the mass of matter which is incessantly thrust upon him ? He is bewildered by the appeals 32 THE FUTURE OF WORK which are made to him, which are nearly always misleading in some degree, and which in many cases are deliberately intended to deceive. The newspaper reader pays for his newspaper, he fondly believes, only one half- penny. As a matter of fact, he pays for his newspaper in two ways : there is the direct payment of a half-penny to the newsagent, and there is the indirect payment which he contributes in the prices of things which he buys from tradesmen — prices which are cal- culated to cover the cost of the advertisements which are daily thrust before his eyes by the newspaper proprietors. One feels sorry for the uninstructed man who, desiring to buy, say, a pianoforte, consults advertisements as the best means of discovering where to buy. And not printing alone, but many other trades give a considerable part of their output to the uses of advertisement. Iron, copper, zinc, enamel, colour, ink, paper, string, gum, wood — the list of articles which are built up into advertisements to deface towns, despoil scenery, and confuse the traveller, is a lengthy one. The workers upon these things are amongst our few " producers," but their production is in vain. I think as I write of a lying cardboard boot- box which I saw not long ago in a boot factory. WASTE OF IPRODUCERS' WORK 33 It was supplied to the boot manufacturer by a mere middleman, who sells boots for about one-third more than he gives for them. It was a box brightly printed with audacious lies. It bore a picture of a factory which did not exist. It stated that the middlemen were manufacturers, when they were not. It bore words to the effect that the contents of the box went straight from the factory to the warehouse, which was untrue. The printer who set up these abominable falsehoods, and the block-maker who supplied the block of the imaginary factory, and the mill which produced the paper bearing the falsehoods, figure in a Board of Trade Census of Pro- duction as " producers," and they are typical of hundreds of thousands who are condemned by commercialism to utter falsehoods built up into all sorts of good, bad, and indifferent materials. In recent years the absurdity of competition by expensive advertisements, which is suffi- ciently obvious in regard to what are com- monly called manufactures, has been imported even into the domain of food supply. Enor- mous sums are spent by competitive firms to persuade the public that there are a number of different individual teas, butters, or bacons. Tea bought in the ordinary process in the 3 34 THE FUTURE OF WORK London market is put up into special packets and labelled with fancy names and advertised in terms which suggest that it possesses in- dividual quality like a Beethoven symphony. The consumer does not dream that, in 1913, 366,000,000 lb. of tea were imported for the small sum of £13,800,000, or only 9d. per pound, and that when he buys tea he pays a tax of 5d. to the Government and a tax of from 4d. in England. The influence of coal as an economic factor has been supreme. Wherever neighbouring coal has afforded rural populations an alternative industry or industries, there the farmers have had to pay higher wages for labour. That, and that alone, is the reason why the farmers of Durham, where coal is rich, have to pay 22s. to their agricultural labourers, while the farmers of coal-less Oxfordshire pay only 16s. ^d. It is remarkable at how short a remove the influence of coal in raising the agricultural wage ceases to have effect, and the fact throws a strong light upon human life and human custom as they are. It is but 200 miles from Oxford to Durham ; it is an even shorter journey to other coal in the Midlands. The rural worker, however, rarely migrates within his own country. The agricultural labourer of Norfolk is not found offering himself either to the farmers or to the coal-owners of Lancashire. The man of Wiltshire rarely or never tears his roots out of his native soil WAGES AS THEY ARE 145 to go to South Wales or to Staffordshire. The economists of the chair, who have made so many extraordinary mistakes, never made one more extraordinary than when they pre- sumed the free mobihty of labour within a country. If the agricultural labourer of Nor- folk migrates at all, it is curiously not to go to Lancashire or to Yorkshire, but to follow the emigration agent to Canada or Australia. With some exceptional cases, such as that of the Irish seasonal migratory labourers, it is generally true that the rural worker does not offer his labour in competition at any very great distance. If it had been otherwise, and if there had been a perfect mobility of labour within the country, then the existing differences of agricultural wage would not have obtained. Proximity to a port has also, of course, a considerable influence in deciding the level of the agricultural wage, and there are a number of minor influences upon which we need not dwell. For example, in Surrey we have the wage affected not only by the proximity of London, but by the fact that many men of means reside in that county and set up alterna- tive employments and help to raise wages by demanding the services of gardeners, coach- men, grooms, and so forth. 10 146 THE RURAL WAGE § 2. Rural Wages in Relation to Prices I now proceed to give some of the most interesting and important facts which we have to bring under consideration. The prices of agricultural produce in this country are governed by our Free Trade policy, combined with the ever-growing efficiency of the engineer in moving food products about the world. Cobden and his fellow workers gave us, as I have often pointed out before, nominal Free Trade, which is all that states- men, as statesmen, can do. The statesman can only say : The ports shall be free. It is the engineer who does the rest, and the rest is the main part of the business. It was the engineer who lowered the price of corn by wiping out what was the equivalent of a high import duty — viz. the high cost of sea carriage. It was the great fall in freights, and the rapid exploitation of virgin fertility in " new " lands, again with the help of the engineer, that reduced food- prices, and the policy of Free Trade at this hour means nothing more than that a states- man says : I will not be so foolish as to deprive my country of the great advantages conferred upon it by the skill of the engineer in bringing us the produce of all the world. WAGES IN RELATION TO PRICES 147 Free ports and the fall in freights brought down the price of agricultural produce in the United Kingdom to a level determined by world production and world demand. The price of corn at this hour is governed by the corn in being and available for shipment, or in prospect for shipment, all over the world. The tremendous importance of these con- siderations in relation to our subject-matter will now appear. We have seen that agricul- tural wages in Great Britain vary greatly. We have now to add, to make the statement of the case complete, that : Agricultural wages in Britain vary greatly in spite of the fact that there is a general level of food-prices throughout the country, food-prices being mainly determined not by home produc- tion, but by world production. I have got out for the first time — I do not think it has been done before — a comparison of the price of wheat with the rate of agricul- tural earnings in the same places throughout Britain. The result, to which I direct the most serious consideration, is given in the table on the following page. It will be seen that I have again taken the three groups of wage rates which I gave on page 141, and taken three specimen counties in each group ; any other selection would 14g THE RURAL WAGE Price op Coen compaked with Rates ov Agbicttltural Eaknings Earnings, 1907*. Wheat Pricea, 1911. Where Wages are 20s. and over : a. d. 8. d. 8. d. Durham ..... Lancashire ..... Yorks (W. Riding) 22 21 20 30 31 29 8 to 31 9 5„ 33 10 ,, 32 8 Where Wages are 18s. to 20s. .* Surrey ..... Glamorgan ..... York3 (East Riding) 19 19 18 9 3 9 30 33 30 10 to 33 5 „ — 7 „ 31 9 Where Wages are 15s. to 18s. .• Northamptonshire Wiltshire Oxfordshire ..... 17 16 16 10 9 4 31 30 30 2 to 31 8 8 „ 31 2 4 „ 31 9 * The earnings for 1911 are not available, but are, of course, of precisely the sama character in point of variation. give the same results, and I have merely restricted the size of the table for the sake of clarity of expression. I have compared for each county the wages with the wheat prices, and what is seen to be the result ? It is that agricultural wages are largely inde- pendent of the price of the food produced by the zv age- earners. Compare the proud head of the list, Durham, with the poor footer of the list, Oxfordshire. We see that the farmers of Durham get their 305. Sd. to Sis. 9d. for corn, and find them- selves able to pay 225. a week for labour, while the farmers of Oxfordshire get almost exactly the same price for their corn — viz. 305. 4d. to WAGES IN RELATION TO PRICES 149 Sis. 9d. — and yet pay their labourers only 16s. id. per week. Look in particular at the comparison between the West Riding of York- shire and the East Riding of Yorkshire. In the West Riding coal is plentiful, therefore the wage is 205. ; in the East Riding coal is not so plentiful, therefore the wage is only ISs. 9d. The prices given are for British corn as sold in the local scheduled markets, and as offi- cially reported to the Board of Agriculture. There is no doubt as to the authenticity of the information, and, indeed, from what I have already said, it will be seen that there cannot be any marked variation in the price of corn of the same quality throughout Britain, because price is governed by the supplies of imported produce. The small variations shown in the corn prices in the above table arise from minor considerations, such as quality, local supplies, and so forth. The general level is determined by foreign and Colonial corn. Now the working of the main economic factors in producing the agricultural wage is almost invisible to those upon whom it operates. The changes take place over a considerable period of years, and in any locality it is only the rare thinking man who takes any trouble to understand what causes are working to 150 THE RURAL WAGE produce certain effects. Just as it is true that the average uneducated man of the town rides in an electric tram without the faintest idea of how it works, or uses a telephone with- out understanding it, or is so guilty of mis- understanding a telephone as to thump it when it does not speak to him quickly enough, so, in a rural neighbourhood, farmer and farmer's man undergo economic transformations with- out understanding or even inquiring what factors are in operation. The agricultural labourer of Surrey is not only without know- ledge of the fact that he earns very much more than the agricultural labourer of Wiltshire, but, even if acquainted with the fact, could not explain to you why it is so. What has " education," as she is written to-day, to do with such important things as these ? When, therefore, the farmer of — shire tells you that he cannot afford to pay a higher wage than 175., including all truck, let us make no mistake as to his sincerity. He thor- oughly believes what he tells you, and it is absurd to blame him for the sincerity of his belief. His representative in Parliament will probably share his belief, and you must not too hastily condemn the honesty of his con- victions on the subject. Nor is the farmer alone, of course, in believing that he can only WAGES IN RELATION TO PRICES 151 pay such wages as have become customary he knows not how. Underpayment, unhappily, as we shall do well to remind ourselves con- tinuously in these days, is not confined to agriculture, and I hope that none of us will forget that agriculture can be at the best only a subsidiary part of the national life in this country, and that it will not do to turn all our attention upon agriculture and to leave the masses of our people to decay in the awful towns that have arisen through other unfortunate economic misunderstandings. The case as to agriculture is clear. We see that out of practically the same price for produce, farmers are paying all sorts of different prices for the labour they employ. Out of the price of the produce comes the profit which is divided between landlord and farmer, partly as rent (using the term " rent " here in its ordinary sense as the rent of the entire farm as a manufactured article) and partly as the fund out of which the farmer makes his own income and pays wage. It is manifest that if the prices can yield 225. in Durham they can yield it also in Oxfordshire, for labour of the same quality. If there is anything, however, as even academic economists have been driven to admit, in the commonsense view that badly paid labour is dear labour. 152 THE RURAL WAGE then it is more than probable that those who pay the better wages get better work, and that, of course, is only another point in favour of higher wages. It is claimed here without reservation that the facts which have been adduced form an unanswerable case for a rural minimum wage. It is not suggested that an attempt should be made forthwith to raise Wiltshire to the level of Durham, or Oxfordshire to the level of Lancashire. It is plainly suggested, how- ever, and indeed urged, that there is an ample margin in the price of produce for the local settlement of a reasonable minimum in every county. § 3. Wages and Efficiency A better wage produces a better man. It is a dictum which is based upon experience, the experience not only of agricultural opera- tions, but of industry at large. It has been well observed that the founder of Lancashire Trade Unionism deserves a monument from the cotton trade, because Lancashire Trade Unionism, by constantly improving the con- ditions of labour in the cotton trade, has com- WAGES AND EFFICIENCY 158 pelled efficiency in the trade, and compelled, therefore, a greater productivity. It is ever the low wage trade which is ineffi- cient. That is the simple secret of the ineffi- ciency of domestic work, considered as an industry. Why is it that we are only just beginning to see placed upon the market appliances to make domestic work decent and comfortable ? Why is it that only at the beginning of the twentieth century have we seen any attempt to invent suction-cleaners and other appliances to assist women in their household work ? The answer is that, in the working-class household, the woman is the unpaid woman-of-all-work, while in the ser- vant-keeping household there has, until recent years, been an ample supply of dirt-cheap labour. How could anybody invent any- thing cheaper than a cheap girl ready to slave from morning till night for a small wage and a fraction of an attic ? Just because in recent years, with increasing alternative better-paid employments offering for women, domestic servants have become more difficult to get, especially in the United States, inventors have been compelled to set their wits to work to devise appliances which otherwise would never have been thought of. So at last there is some hope of making domestic industry 154 THE RURAL WAGE something better than eternal drudgery. To vary an old proverb, a high wage is the father of invention. What is true of the triumphant Lancashire cotton trade, and what is true of domestic industry, is true of every trade, and certainly not less true of agriculture than of other trades. In Scotland and the North, where the agricul- tural labourer is better paid, he undoubtedly gives better work. Let no one suppose that the 165. to 17s. of Oxfordshire or Wiltshire or Norfolk or Suffolk commands the best work of the men who get these paltry sums, or that it produces men capable of making the best exertions. Do we expect good work from a horse when we deny him good food and good housing ? I recently had before my eyes an example of the different work to be obtained by paying horses well and paying them badly. It was a job in which it was necessary to cart heavy loads over uneven ground. There came along the municipal cart, horsed by a well- paid animal. The well-fed and well-housed horse surmounted the difficulties and took its load to the proper destination. Then came along the contractor's horse which, although paid at a much better rate than the Wiltshire labourer, was obviously not so well paid as the municipal horse. It failed to surmount WAGES AND EFFICIENCY 155 the difficulties, and its load had to be deposited short of the place required. One could have no neater illustration of the difference between high wages and low wages in their effect upon physiological actions. But man is something more than an animal, and in his work not only physiological, but psychological influences tell their tale. The ill-paid man, the down-trodden man, the hopeless man, the man without spirit, is not only a man lacking brute force, but a man lacking in the power to overcome difficulties and to confront the problems of everyday life. With him the common task is a dull round. " To eat to work, to work to eat to gain the strength to work. So we go round the ruddy ring o' roses." I forget who wrote these lines, but they stick in my mind. It is not yet widely understood that the cost of the worker is not the same thing as the cost of the work. It is the cost of the unit of work that matters. The Japanese cotton opera- tives, with their few pence a day, cannot rival the work of Lancashire operatives, who earn more in a few hours than Japanese operatives earn in a week. The absurdly low wages of the Japanese do not enable Japan to beat us in competition in the cotton trade. The 156 THE RURAL WAGE much higher Lancashire wage amounts to a lower cost of labour per unit of work. It is perfectly true that wages are an element in price, but they do not form an element which is directly proportionate to the rate of wages paid. On the contrary, cheap labour is a dear element in price, and dear labour is a cheap element in price up to the point at which the wage is high enough to produce the maximum of efficiency. As far as agriculture is con- cerned, we have seen the farmers of one part of the country paying nearly 6s. a week more to their labourers than the farmers of another part, and that this economic phenomenon is independent of price, since the price of agricultural produce in Britain is determined by world supply and demand, and not by British supply and demand only. It is clear that one of two things must be true, either (1) that the farmer of Oxfordshire can afford to pay up the balance of nearly 65. a week, or (2) that because he pays 6s. less he gets less return per man in production. Which- ever of these two hypotheses is true, or in whatever degrees they respectively share in the problem, the case for considerably higher wages in Oxfordshire is established beyond dispute. If Durham and Scotland were foreign countries, we should find the farmers of Oxford- WAGES AND EFFICIENCY 157 shire declaring that fiscal policy or something of that kind enabled the farmers of Durham or Scotland to pay higher wages. As Durham is in England, fiscal nonsense cannot be dragged in in this connection. The effect of the payment of better wages upon the master is no less marked than upon the man. Good wages are doubly blessed ; they bless both those who give and those who take. When a master in any trade is compelled to pay higher wages — no matter whether the compulsion be that his men have alternative employments offered them, or that they com- bine together in a trade union and demand a better wage, or that the law steps in, as under the Trade Boards Act, and says that he shall not pay low wages — the master has to look about him and mend his ways. Experience shows that he does not content himself with paying the higher wage forced upon him. He looks round to see what economies he can make to compensate him for the higher wage, and in the general case he soon finds means of effecting economies. The argument here is precisely the same as in connection with the costs forced upon employers by factory legislation in all countries. When you force a factory owner or occupier to provide proper 158 THE RURAL WAGE ventilation, to whitewash walls, to provide sanitary appliances, to safeguard machinery, to provide washing appliances, to provide a meal-room or rest-room, what you do is to compel the man to help himself. Any sensible and really businesslike business manager makes his workpeople comfortable and safe, as a matter of course, and as a matter of business. It is the second-rate man, the foolish man, the thoughtless man, who fancies that a dirty, ill-equipped factory or business can be a paying proposition. When, there- fore, the law compels second-rate and unwise men to do what first-rate and wise men do without compulsion, then the law is beneficial to industry. Factory laws are a great incentive to effi- ciency in industry, but higher wages are an even better incentive. A man compelled, by whatever circumstances, to pay good wages, respects those to whom he has to pay them, and does everything he possibly can to get his money's-worth by working for efficiency in every department of his business. He watches waste, he looks out for labour-saving appliances, he looks at every penny of cost that enters into the price of his goods. Inven- tion is thrust upon him by necessity. It is in the trades in which the highest WAGES AND EFFICIENCY 159 wages are paid, therefore, that the greatest efficiency obtains, and it is in these that Britain finds herself most efficient. The trades in which our export power is strongest are those which are the best organised and the best paid. By the same token you shall know most surely which are the most successful countries. Pick out those nations where wages are highest, and you also pick out the nations which have the largest exports and the greatest industrial strength and competitive power. It was lack of realisation of these profound economic truths that gave us the Railways Act of 1913 in fulfilment of a promise that if the railway companies raised wages they should be enabled to charge the wages to the public in higher prices. The Act and promise were alike based upon an elementary fallacy. The promise was made when the railway com- panies were paying an average wage to adult men of only about 255. a week. You cannot on such a wage get the maximum of efficiency out of adult men. Therefore, any increase of wage paid by the railway companies would not raise their labour costs, but give them an in- creased efficiency in full or more than full repayment. Therefore, there was no need for either the promise or the Railways Act based upon the promise. In proof of which let us 160 THE RURAL WAGE observe that the German national railways have raised the wages of their workpeople fully 20 per cent, in the last ten years without raising fares and without raising freight rates, just as the British Post Office has raised wages while reducing charges. One of the cheapest motor-cars in the world is made in England by a man who pays a minimum wage, to his meanest workers, of about £3 a week. Who can doubt the crying need for more efficiency in British agriculture, and how is it to be secured while those who work in it are remunerated so poorly ? There is an absurd idea abroad that agriculture does not demand the same qualities of science or intellect that are demanded by industrial operations, and, indeed, it is true that science has not yet given anything like the same degree of assist- ance to agriculture that it has to industry. There are not wanting signs, however, that in the course of the next generation science will have atoned for this neglect, and will have changed agricultural operations very greatly indeed. The improvements in agriculture in the last two generations have been chiefly concerned with the work of the engineer in helping mechanical operations and providing mechanical appliances. Great things have been done in that direction, but in other direc- WAGES AND EFFICIENCY 161 tions science has done comparatively little. The breeding of plants, the study of soils, the application of bacteriology, the use of electricity, the rapid cultivation of soils by ex- plosives, these things will in the near future raise agriculture from one of the least scientific to one of the most scientific of trades. The conception of the " country bumpkin " has got to go, and will assuredly go. Rule-of- thumb in agriculture will have no chance in the future. Agriculture will have to be carried on by intelligent, well-educated, and well- remunerated people. It will not be a growing industry, because each successful application of science will reduce the number of persons required to grow a given quantity of food, and as the need for food and organic materials is strictly limited, the proportion of men required to grow produce must decline. That, of course, is a good thing for mankind and not a bad thing, since the fewer men required for one industry the more are set free for other industries, and the call for the product of other industries is, of course, without practical limit. When all imaginable improvements have been made in the growing of food, how- ever, agriculture will always remain actually a great industry, if proportionately not such a great industry as it is in the world of to-day. 11 162 THE RURAL WAGE The need for a higher agricultural wage emerges in whatever way we look at the prob- lem, whether we have regard to considera- tions of wealth production or of humanity. Whether we consider the interests of the nation or of the individual, whether we look at it from the point of view of the farmer or of that of the labourer, we are driven to the same conclusion, that there is an unanswerable case for a better rural wage, and that it is a national interest that that better wage should be secured. § 4. A Minimum Wage in Agriculture We now come to the consideration of the practical means of arriving at a minimum agricultural wage. What is required is » machinery which shall make it possible to have regard to all the practical circumstances of the case in any and every rural district. In the first place, we have to remember that it is not in practice possible to force up wages to one general level for the whole coun- try. It would not be possible to enforce the payment in every rural district of the rates A MINIMUM IN AGRICULTURE 163 now paid in the best-paid districts. We cannot hope by a single stroke to raise Oxfordshire to the level of Durham. In the second place, our machinery must be such as shall make it possible in every district to have regard to the peculiar customs and methods of payment of the district. In this connection we have already seen that the agricultural labourer receives a certain part of his remuneration, varying from district to district, not in cash, but in kind. He may have a free cottage as part of his wages, or a cottage let to him at a nominal rent instead of its true rental value. He may have an allowance of milk or meal or cider or potatoes or fuel. As we have seen, the value of these various payments in kind was allowed for by the Board of Trade in arriving at the total earnings in all parts of the country. In the third place, the term of engagement varies in different districts. In Scotland and the North there is a custom of engagement for a year, which is, of course, a guarantee against unemployment, and which enables a man to settle down in his cottage and to cultivate his bit of ground in some sort of security that he will reap where he has sown. In the South there is too often a mere weekly or even daily engagement, where the agricul- 164 THE RURAL WAGE tural labourer is in no better case in point of security of employment than, say, the builder's labourer in the towns. In the fourth place, piece-work is no stranger to many agricultural labourers. Here is an account, given by the late Mr. Arthur Wilson Fox, of the Board of Trade, upon earnings of individual agricultural labourers in 1903, as returned by their employers : Farmers ' Own Reports, 1903 Cash Payments. County. Piece- Harvest ^^^^l' Ordinaiy Total Reported Value of Payments in Kind. work. time, etc. W age. Caah. £ 8. £ a. £ s. £ «. Northumberland . 4 48 52 Cottage and gar- den, £5 ; pota- toes, 70s. ; harvest food, 4«. ; coal carted, 24«. Warwickshire 3 10 5 7 26 5 35 2 None, Northamptonshire 22 12 8 2 14 16 45 10 None. Herefordshire 4 17 33 8 38 5 House and garden, £5; potatoe ground, 7s. Gd. Somersetshire 2 5 3 14 29 17 35 16 None.* • Cottage and garden let to the labourer for £2 12*. a year, but worth more, amounting to an allowance. These examples are taken from widely separated districts, and the reader will see how greatly custom varies. In the Northum- berland case no piece-work is done, the man gets £l a week in hard cash, and in addition a cottage and garden, 705. worth of potatoes, A MINIMUM IN AGRICULTURE 165 a little food and drink at harvest time, and the free carting of his coal. The valuations of the worth of these items in kind are those of the farmer himself. In the Warwickshire case there is a small payment for piece-work ; the man gets only £35 a year, and he gets no payment whatever in kind. In the Northamptonshire case the payments for piece-work are actually greater than the ordinary wages, and again there is no allowance in kind. As to Herefordshire, we have the case of a man who has no piece-work earnings apart from harvest money, and he gets a cottage and a bit of ground on which to grow potatoes, which the farmer puts down as worth a rent of 7^. 6d. a year. In the Somersetshire case there are small piece-work earnings, and the labourer gets no allowance in kind save a cottage and garden let at less than their economic rental. It is urged here that great as are the dis- similarities of wage and of custom in various agricultural districts, we have already estab- lished under the law a machinery quite adapt- able to such circumstances, and, further, that we have seen in various voluntary Wage Boards difficulties of the same kind easily surmounted. The affairs of men, of course, cannot be ruled 166 THE RURAL WAGE out into rectangles, and the Trade Boards system affords us a means of adapting the principle of the minimum wage to customs of widely differing trades or of widely varying districts. When we talked of establishing Trade Boards for sweated workers some years ago, there were many who contended that the varying customs of trades made it inherently impossible to apply legal minima to them. We had to point out then that already, by voluntary agreement in many trades, the supposed im- possibilities were surmounted. At the Con- ference on the Minimum Wage convened by the National Anti-Sweating League, and held at the Guildhall, London, in October, 1906, Sir George Askwith, then Mr. Askwith, pointed out how voluntary agreements of employers and employed had fixed minima in trades of considerable elaboration. He instanced the Nottingham lace trade, of which he had personal knowledge as arbitrator. I may usefully repeat what Mr. Askwith said : " Perhaps you will forgive me for instancing a most elaborate inquiry I had to conduct in connection with the manufacture of lace. The due rate of wages in classes of work had to be found by joint request of employers and employees. The whole industry was entitled A MINIMUM IN AGRICULTURE 167 the lace weaving trade of Nottingham. It has three branches or sections — the plain net, the lace curtain, and the fancy laces. The plain net section is not so complicated as the other sections, but the curtain has eight different cards on which work is produced, and the fancy lace had twenty-one, and now has fifteen — thick thread laces, plain bobbin fining and Valenciennes, torchons, Maltese, blondes, Spanish, Chantilly, cotton loop, sprigs, and many others. There had to be taken into account the classes of lace being made, the number of points to the inch, the number of bars, and the length of the rack, and many other matters besides. The wages of each class and branch of laceworkers required separate consideration, and was discussed and fought word by word and line by line upon these numbers of cards." As a result, Mr. Askwith concluded, "In few instances did dispute arise as to the amount of a minimum wage where such minimum was required." And then, as now, we were able to point to the experience of the Wages Boards of Victoria. Who could imagine a more difficult trade in which to determine minimum rates than the underclothing industry ? Yet even here the difficulties were finally surmounted, although 168 THE RURAL WAGE they are obviously much greater than those connected with either the Nottingham lace trade or with British agriculture. Further, in 1914 we are able to point to the remarkable success in the United Kingdom of the Trade Boards Act of 1909. It has suc- ceeded in levelling up wages in a number of trades. What is a Trade Board ? As established by the Trade Boards Act of 1909, it is a body upon which employers and employed are equally represented, and its chairman is chosen from the members by the Board of Trade. The secretary of the Trade Board is also appointed by the Board of Trade. The mem- bers of the Board are either elected to it by employers and employed respectively, or they may be nominated by the Board of Trade. Provision for nomination was put in for the benefit of the workers in trades which consist of wholly unorganised and badly paid women. In the case of a trade like agriculture, the representatives of the men would be elected by the labourers, and the representatives of the employers would be elected by the farmers. The Trade Board thus constituted, and equally representative of employer and em- ployed, fixes minimum rates of wages for time- work or for piece-work, and these rates they A MINIMUM IN AGRICULTURE 169 may apply universally to the trade, or to any special process, or to any special class of workers, or to any particular district or dis- tricts. Having arrived at its determination, the Trade Board gives notice of the fact, and six months later the Board of Trade makes an " Obligatory Order," which compels the payment of the determined rate, and in effect gives it legal authority. Such a Trade Board may be truly termed a Wage Parliament. Imagine a Board so con- stituted in every district, set up to determine a minimum rate of remuneration for the labourers of the district, or to arrange varying minima for the various classes of labourers in the district. As soon as the subject was approached in this way, the difficulties which seem so great at a distance would appear in their true proportions as by no means insur- mountable. As a local institution, the body would respect local custom, and have regard to all the various methods of payment. Time- work rates or piece-work rates would present no difficulty, as is proved by experience here and abroad. Such matters as separate pay- ment for harvest work would be susceptible of simple adjustment. With regard to cottage accommodation, there would appear to be no inherent difficulty in making due allowance in 170 THE RURAL WAGE any given case. Similarly with regard to payments in bacon or milk or vegetables or fuel : it would not be more difficult to argue out what they should be counted for in value than for the farmer to return their value to the Board of Trade as we see in the table on page 164. Discussion of such matters would certainly have one happy result, and that is that where cottages are inadequate and insanitary, as they so often are, we should have them discussed in this local parliament of work as they had never been discussed before. I think it is clear that the successful working of the Trade Boards system in relation to agriculture calls for the settlement of local minima by District or County Boards, as in the case of the Coal Mines Minimum Wage Act of 1912. Indeed, as we have seen, agri- cultural wages vary from district to district chiefly because of the unequal distribution of coal throughout the United Kingdom and the unequal richness of various coal areas. Just as District Boards were necessary in the case of the miners' minimum wage, so they are necessary in the case of the agricultural mini- mum wage. The Trade Boards Act of 1909 did, indeed, contemplate the establishment of District Trade Committees in certain cases ; A MINIMUM IN AGRICULTURE 171 but what is called for in the agricultural case is a definite County Trade Board, and for this reason it would not be advisable to extend the Trade Boards Act in its present form to agriculture. With very little amendment, however, the Trade Boards Act could be so shaped as to be capable of application not only to agriculture, but to any and every trade in the country. The question remains whether a minimum wage should be determined for the country as a whole — a minimum below which no County Trade Board should have power to make a determination. It is questionable whether this could be done while the matter of a general minimum wage remains in abey- ance. I do not conceal my own view that, in view of the dimensions of the National Dividend, the time is ripe for the enactment of what may be termed a Physiological Minimum or Living Wage, which should be established in principle by Parliament, and in detail by a permanent Commission, set up by Parliament, which should revise its determination, say, every five years, and which should have regard to the cost of subsistence and to the wealth of the country as a whole. Such a Commission would, of course, have regard to the varying cost of living in different districts, and adjust 172 THE RURAL WAGE its figures to the circumstances of each district. The recommendations of the Commission would become law after consideration by and with the approval of Parliament. The physiological or general minimum thus arrived at would be a determination which would rule industry at large. In each particu- lar trade, however, the minimum or minima for various classes of workers would be arrived at by Trade Boards after the manner of the Trade Boards Act, and these Boards would determine rates in relation to the productivity of each trade, having no power, of course, to make a determination below the general physiological minimum. Who can doubt that the general establish- ment of what I have termed Wage Parliaments would be a potent factor in relation to '' labour unrest " — I will not say in allaying it, for I dislike the suggestion that labour unrest is a nuisance to be got rid of — but I will say in providing an immediate and a just tribunal of representative character which would be continuously at work to adjust the remunera- tion of labour in relation to the general wealth of the country, the cost of living, and the pro- ductivity of industries. The argument that Parliament has no business to Interfere with wages is only true A MINIMUM IN AGRICULTURE 173 in so far as Parliament is not a convenient tribunal to adjust the actual details of re- muneration. It is not true as a denial of the expediency of the establishment by Par- liament of the principle of the living wage, and of the establishment of a common-sense machinery to determine for each trade suitable minima for all the classes of workers employed in it. VIII THE MINIMUM WAGE IN PRACTICE § 1. The Trade Boards Act of 1909 'T^HE first direct Parliamentary interference with wages in modern times has proved a triumphant success. A great principle has been vindicated ; a great faith has been confirmed. It was as recently as 1909 that the Government wrote the Minimum Wage in the British Statute Book, and it was in January, 1910, that the Act came into operation. After three years' experience, the House of Commons unanimously confirmed the policy of the Act by extending it. Simultaneously proposals are coming from all quarters to carry the principle further still, and the cause of just remuneration is making a swift march. Yet it seems but the other day that many of us scarcely dared to hope that Parliament would listen to our proposals. I like to think in especial of the Trade Boards Act of 1909 as a monument to the labours and Parliamentary ability of the late Sir Charles Dilke. I grate- 174 THE TRADE BOARDS ACT OF 1909 175 fully remember that it was through him that I had the honour of serving upon the Home Work or Sweating Committee which was set up at his suggestion, and the recommendations of which were immediately accepted and carried out by the Government in the passing of the Trade Boards Act. Indeed, I am glad to say that the Government went further than the Select Committee. The Committee, most un- fortunately, and in spite of the urgent repre- sentations of a minority, confined their recommendations, by a majority of eight votes to six, to the application of the minimum wage principle to sweated " home workers " only, and not to sweated workers wherever sweated. The Government wisely overruled this limita- tion. The grateful thanks of those interested in the minimum wage are also due to Mr. George Cadbury, who, through The Daily News and its staff, organised the Sweated Industries Exhibition of 1906, which did so much to direct public attention to the subject, and to prepare the way for the subsequent work of the National Anti-Sweating League, which, largely through the ability and devotion of its secretary, Mr. James J. Mallon, has secured the active and enlightened administration of the new law. 176 MINIMUM WAGE IN PRACTICE The Trade Boards Act established as a general legislative principle that, in any trade in which the rate of wages is " exceptionally low as compared with that in other employments,''^ a Wage Board shall be set up to determine a minimum rate of wage, and that the deter- mination arrived at by the Board shall have the force of law and be enforceable upon any employer in the trade under severe penalties. Each Trade Board consists of members, representing in equal numbers employers and workers in a trade, sitting together with a smaller number of members unconnected with the trade and appointed by the Board of Trade. A Board may be set up for a trade as a whole or for a branch of a trade. A Trade Board has, in its turn, power to establish District Trade Committees to advise it as to the conditions of any particular area, but it is the Trade Board and not the District Board which fixes the minimum in any area. For Ireland separate Trade Boards are established. Wherever possible, the employers and workers in any trade elect members to repre- sent them on the Trade Boards, but the Board of Trade has power by regulations (properly challengeable in Parliament) either to provide for such election or themselves to nominate representatives. THE TRADE BOARDS ACT OF 1909 177 Although the Act passed through Parha- ment without a division on principle — a fact as remarkable in its way as that the words " unearned increment " were written in a Finance Act of Parliament by Mr. Asquith without challenge from any one, or that the Development Act, a measure of pure Socialism, passed the House of Commons with the glad approval of all parties — it was in the first place limited in its application to four trades — viz. : (1) Ready-made and wholesale bespoke tailoring. (2) Box making (of paper, cardboard, chip or similar material). (3) Machine-made lace and net finishing. (4) Chain making by hand. Beyond this the Board of Trade is em- powered to extend the Act by provisional order, but such provisional order has no effect unless and until confirmed by Parliament. So that the Trade Boards Act of 1909 set up a general principle, limited its immediate appli- cation to four specified trades, and, in effect, told the Board of Trade to come to Parliament again if they thought it advisable. Not a moment was lost by the Board of Trade in administering the Act. Six Trade Boards were promptly set up, as follows : (1) Chain making. 12 178 MINIMUM WAGE IN PRACTICE (2) Lace finishing. (3) Paper-box making, Great Britain. (4) Paper-box making, Ireland. (5) Tailoring, Great Britain. (6) Tailoring, Ireland. The following examples show how the Boards are constituted in different cases : The Lace-finishing Trade Board Members appointed by Board of Trade Nominated by Board of Trade to represent employers ...... Nominated by Board of Trade to represent the workers ...... Additional members chosen by Board of Trade : Employers ... 2 Workers .... 2 4 23 Chain Boakd Members appointed by Board of Trade Elected by employers Elected by workers .... 3 6 6 15 Now let us see what the six Boards, covering four trades, have done. The following table is an official summary of the minimum time- rates which have been fixed : Trade. Rate for Females. Pence per hour. Rate for Males. Pence per hoar. Chain making .... Lace finishing .... Box making : Great Britain ,, ,, Lreland Tailoring : Great Britain . „ Lreland . 2i 2f 3 2i H Not yet fixed. 5 to 7 5„ 7 6 6 6 Not yet fixed. THE TRADE BOARDS ACT OF 1909 1^9 Let it be carefully understood what these rates mean. They are minimum time rates, to which, if piece-work rates are paid, the piece- work rates must conform. They do not mean that the employer must pay by time and not by piece. A Trade Board must fix a minimum time rate, and may fix a minimum piece rate expressing the time rate. When a Trade Board establishes a time rate and does not establish a piece rate expressing it, the employer may either (1) himself fix a piece rate, which he must be able to show, if chal- lenged, to be equivalent to the statutory minimum, or (2) he may apply to the Board of Trade to fix a piece rate for his employees. § 2. What the Act has Accomplished The minimum rates which have been named may seem low, but they are very much greater than the rates of pay which obtained before the Boards were set up, and are, of course, susceptible of increase from time to time upon cause shown. In some cases the above rates represent twice as much, or more than twice as much, as was paid before- time. Take, for example, the making of small 180 MINIMUM WAGE IN PRACTICE chains at Cradley Heath, a trade largely in the hands of women. In the old days a woman outworker got for making hand-hammered chains a few shillings a hundredweight. I have the authority of Mr. Mallon for saying that workers who received for making a certain class of chain 3s. Sd. per hundred- weight, now get 6s. Gd. This particular change works out thus : Under the old con- ditions two hundredweights of chain yielded 65. 6d., less 2s. 6d. for forge rent and fuel, leaving net 4^. Under the Trade Board deter- mination the woman now gets 135. for making the chain, and again allowing 25. 6d. for fuel and rent, she gets a net IO5. 6d., or an increase of 150 per cent, through the operation of the Act. Many women making low quality chain now earn 125. to 145. a week, which is much more than twice their old earnings. In the men's trade — men, and a few exceptionally strong women, make strong chains by means of hammers worked with a treadle — propor- tionate results have been achieved. The minimum wage at Cradley Heath was not brought in without some trouble with the employers. It is regrettable that some of the employers endeavoured to pile up a stock of chain made at the old sweated rates in the interval before the Board's determina- WHAT THE ACT HAS DONE 181 tion came into force. This interval arose from the fact that the Board of Trade under the Act can only make the minimum rate obliga- tory six months after the determination. Fortunately, the chainmakers, aided by the Women's Trade Union League and the National Anti-Sweating League, felt themselves strong enough to demand the new rates immediately. Upon this demand being presented, the em- ployers locked out their miserably paid workers ; but public sympathy was aroused, and after a few months of struggle the employers gave in and consented to pay the new rates before they became obligatory. The Cradley chain trade is also remarkable ' for the first prosecution of an employer for failure to pay the minimum rate. It was a very bad case, the employer going the length of making false entries in his wages books in order to conceal his evasion of the Act. In the laconic words of the officii 1 report : "As the Court considered that the offences were serious, they imposed fines amounting to £15, with £9 95. costs ; and in addition the defendant was ordered to pay to the workers arrears of wages amounting to £7 155. lOfcZ." Section 6 of the Trade Boards Act fortunately provides that the amount underpaid must be paid up in addition to the penalty. 182 MINIMUM WAGE IN PRACTICE As a consequence of this series of events the workers have gained an entirely new spirit, and some months ago (I write in May 1914) demanded that the minimum rates first fixed should be improved. After consideration the demand was acceded to, and the original minimum rates have now been increased by 10 per cent. Old prophecies of woe to industries called upon to pay better wages have, of course, been falsified by the Cradley Heath case. Although wages have been so greatly raised, and in some cases doubled, or more than doubled, the industry has pros- pered more and not less since the operation of the minimum. It is probably true that few employers know what wages they can afford to pay. That is why we get such extraordinary variations of remuneration in some trades — variations which exist without any logical nexus with the quality of work, or strenuous- ness of work, or productivity of the trades. Many of the Nottingham lace finishers, before the Trade Boards Act, were almost as badly off as the women of Cradley Heath, and the trade had the further complication that much of the home work passed through the hands of middle-women, who, themselves receiving a poor rate, sometimes sweated the actual workers very badly indeed. We may WHAT THE ACT HAS DONE 183 illustrate in this case how the minimum time rate of 2^d. per hour is interpreted by Board of Trade regulation in the shape of general minimum piece rates. The official notice relating to machine-made lace and net finishing reads as follows : " The general minimum piece rates for the commonest quality of the following processes in machine-made lace and net finishing, other than the finishing of the product of plain net machines, shall, except in the case of warp laces, be as follows : For DRAWING, l^d. per thread per gross yards for all threads. For ROVING, Id. per thread per gross yards. For CLIPPING, Id. per thousand clips. Two cuts shall count as one clip. For SCOLLOPING, 1^. per dozen yards. Stiffer or better qualities are goods finer than 40 inches to the double rack of 3,840 motions. An attempt to meet the difficult question of the middle-woman was made in this con- nection by providing that where the worker fetches her own work from the warehouse, an additional rate must be paid to compensate her for her loss of time. There are few diffi- 184 MINIMUM WAGE IN PRACTICE culties in any trade which cannot be solved in practice by a Wages Board. It is a happy thing for the pubHc, as well as for the workers concerned, that the enor- mous trade of paper-box making should be brought under decent conditions. Paper boxes, to hold all sorts of things from boots to confectionery, have in the past been made in filthy and infected rooms, out of which the boxes emerge with an apparent cleanliness which is altogether belied by their true condi- tion. I fear it cannot be said that the unhealthy conditions are swept away by the enactment in this trade of a minimum wage of 3d. per hour in Great Britain and 2|d. per hour in Ireland, but undoubtedly something has been done to mitigate an evil which has its punishments for the innocent consumer as well as for the guilty employer and the sweated worker. I do not know whether it is fortunate or unfor- tunate that the white boxes, which are now used so commonly, cannot tell their pitiful history to those who use them. As to the box trade, we have the evidence of the Earnings Enquiry of 1906 to show how badly a minimum wage was needed in the trade. It is shown by this Wage Census that, upon returns made by the employers themselves, and which are not likely therefore WHAT THE ACT HAS DONE 185 to under-state the rates paid, the average earnings for full time of the women employed was 125. Sd. a week, and that nearly 25 per cent, of the women workers earned less than 105. a week. The present minimum rates which the workers are about (May 1914) to attempt to raise are therefore above the preceding average. The wholesale tailoring Board for Great Britain, as we have seen, fixed a minimum rate for women of S^d. per hour and for men of 66^. per hour. Again the Wage Census of 1906 helps us to see how much the workers in this trade needed legislative assistance. Accord- ing to returns made by employers, women working full time in 1906 earned an average of only 125. llc^. per week. Of the women working power sewing-machines, 21 per cent, earned less than 105. a week. Of the hand sewers and finishers, 38 per cent, earned less than 105. a week. These figures, it should be remembered, refer not to young girls, but to women over eighteen years of age. The minimum is now S^d. per hour, so that in a fifty-one hours' week the minimum earning would be nearly 145. as compared with the old average of 125. lid. Like the rates in the other trades, the tailoring minimum is 186 MINIMUM WAGE IN PRACTICE not to stand at its original level and its increase is under consideration. The minimum rates in the tailoring trade have only been in force since February, 1913. In all the four trades scheduled under the Act of 1909, the Trade Boards have dealt with the question of learners, suitable minima being fixed for these in proper relation to the minima fixed for adults. For example, in the lace- finishing trade, the rates for learners range from 5s. a week for learners of thirteen and under fourteen years of age, up to the full minimum rate, which is reached at between fifteen and eighteen years of age, according to years of service. It may be remembered that amongst the favourite points of objection to the minimum wage principle, the slow or ageing worker takes a high place. We are asked to pity the infirm worker, and not to ruin him by a minimum wage, which would lead to his dis- missal. In practice, however, the point is not of any real importance. The Act of 1909 provided for it by authorising the Trade Boards to grant a permit exempting an exceptional person from the operation of the determination. It is of interest to note that so far the number of permits authorised is as follows : Lace finishing, 2 ; Box making, Great WHAT THE ACT HAS DONE 187 Britain, 24 ; Tailoring, Great Britain, 95. The aggregate of these special cases is insignifi- cant when compared with the number of work- people who were brought under the Act of 1909, for the number is officially computed at 200,000 workers, of whom about 70 per cent, consist of women and girls. § 3. The Extension of 1913 Thus, in about three years, the provisions of the Trade Boards Act of 1909 have been carried into effect, and the minimum wage set up in chain making by hand, lace finishing, cardboard-box making, and wholesale tailor- ing. In 1913 the early experience of the working of the Act, combined with the accumu- lating revelations of the Wage Census of 1906, led the Board of Trade to propose to Parlia- ment the extension of the Act in the manner contemplated by the measure itself. The Trade Boards Act Provisional Orders Bill of 1913 sought to confirm the addition of the following five trades to the schedule. (1) Sugar, Confectionery, and Food pre- serving. (2) Shirt making. 188 MINIMUM WAGE IN PRACTICE (3) Hollow-ware. (4) Linen and cotton embroidery. (5) Calendering and machine ironing in steam laundries. The Bill was referred to a Select Committee, which recommended that the inclusion of the first four trades named should be confirmed, but that the last should be omitted. The reason for this unfortunate omission was not the merits of the case. It appeared that there are laundries, in which other than steam power is employed, which were not sufficiently described by the term " steam laundries " used by the official draughtsman, and on this technical point the Provisional Order was op- posed, and failed. This year (1914), however, the Board of Trade have promptly made another Order with a better definition, and I earnestly hope it will be found that laundry proprietors will not have profited by the delay. Laundry work is a humble occupation which has come through the use of power machinery to be worked by large and small capitalists. We must not permit capitalist farming of the wash-tub to be done at the expense of women and girls. The prices we pay are high enough to afford a decent living. It is strange that for the getting up of a shirt we should pay as much as 4^^. or 6rf., and find THE EXTENSION OF 1913 189 it yield little to the woman who actually did the work, just as it is strange that we should pay five to eight shillings for the shirt itself, and find it yield so little to the shirt-maker. The Wage Census (remember that it is based on returns made by employers and not by workers) shows that of the women calenderers who worked full time in 1906, 42 per cent, earned less than IO5. a week. Yet the em- ployers of women, proved to pay wages as bad as this, are fighting hard against the inclusion of their trade under the Trade Boards Act. I heartily commend to every wearer of clean linen the spirit of the representations made to the Parliamentary Committee by the counsel employed by the capitalist washer- woman, and especially the tone of the questions which the counsel in question addressed to the Board of Trade representative. For example, when Mr. Barnes, of the Board of Trade, handed counsel the extraordinary figures I have quoted, it was received with the exclamation, " This thing ? " I think that " this thing " will prove too much for sweating laundry proprietors before this year has passed. Let us take the four trades to which the Trade Boards Act was extended in 1913 and see what women earn in them. Last 190 MINIMUM WAGE IN PRACTICE year we had published a report on the wages earned in the four trades in 1906, the lapse of seven years between the date of inquiry and the date of report being explained by the fact that the Board of Trade has to work with a staff that badly needs enlargement. With regard to cocoa, chocolate, and sugar confectionery, it is shown that women working full time earn on the average only lis. 9d. a week, and that over 40 per cent, earn less than 10s. a week. This does not refer to girls, but to women over eighteen. As to girls, of those working full time, over 90 per cent, earn less than 10s., and nearly 19 per cent, under 5s. We plainly see, therefore, how well justified was the Board of Trade in proposing to Parliament that these workers should be protected by the minimum wage principle. As to shirt making, it is shown by the Wage Census that 22 per cent, of the women working full time earn less than 10s. a week. The average earnings of all the women employed for full time was only ISs. 4d. a week, and one is constrained to wonder what becomes of the price we pay in the shops for shirts. One part of the answer is very quickly given, and it is that if you buy a shirt for 6s. , fully 25. represents the retail profit. As to the THE EXTENSION OF 1913 191 remaining 45., it is quite clear that not very much can be represented by material, and in view of the fact that the women in the trade earn an average of only 135. 4 nuilly raised ezpendltnie. In the United Kingdom figures in the above table I have had to include the Post Office outgo, because all the other figures are similarly 230 THE ROAD TO RUIN vitiated. With regard to the German facts, it should be understood that the figures quoted relate solely to the German Imperial expenditure, which does not compare with ours, because each State of the Empire makes expenditure which in our accounts ranks as Imperial expenditure. It is for that reason that the German figures appear to be smaller than ours. The table then is useless for the purposes of precise comparison. It is useful, however, as showing us that all these six countries have made great increases in their expenditures, and that it is far from true that the United King- dom has conspicuously increased hers. It is remarkable also that in this very period, during which State expenditures all over the world have been rising rapidly, trade, pro- duction, and income have also increased. All the prophecies of disaster and ruin have been most amusingly falsified. Never before has the world witnessed such an advance in trade. Never before was luxury so rampant, not only here, but in Germany, in America, in France, and elsewhere. A SENSE OF PROPORTION 231 § 2. Towards a Sense of Proportion To return to the consideration of our own national expenditure, we see that it is far from true that the main increase in the last decade has been in respect of armaments, as is so commonly alleged and supposed. The chief cause of the increase is found in the new positive policy of social reform. Old Age Pensions, Insurance, and Labour Exchanges account for over £22,000,000 of the increase. As to the Army and Navy, what has been the actual increase in recent years of the armaments which we are assured can bring us only one thing, and that disaster ? It ap- pears that even our Jeremiahs are acquainted with the fact that our Army expenditure has not increased in the last ten years (it has fallen, if the rise in prices is taken into account), for I do not observe any deputations to the Prime Minister on account of the Army, although an Army is, of course, not absolutely necessary to our national existence. It is upon the Navy that so much is being written in 1914 by men who forget that this is an Island which imports one-half of its food and three-fourths of its materials. In the table of expenditure figures given above, the crude totals of Navy expenditure in 1904-5 and 232 THE ROAD TO RUIN 1914-15 respectively appear as £36,800,000 and £51,600,000, an increase of £14,800,000. These figures, as we have said, are mis- leading. In 1904-5 the Unionists borrowed largely for naval purposes, whereas the Liberal Government, in pursuance of their pledges made when out of office, have paid for naval works out of revenue, and placed them on the Estimates. A true account of total naval expenditure for the years 1904-5 to 1914-15 is as follows : Beitish Naval Expenditure Annuity in Total Expen- Gross Total Repayment diture exclu- Expendi- of Naval Total Expen- of Loans sive of ture from Appropria- tions in Aid. Expenditure. Year. diture from Navy Votes under Naval Works Acts Annuity. Loans underNaval (Totals of (net). (including (Column 3 Works Columns 3, 4 interest). deducted from Column 1.) Acts. and 5.) (1) (2) (3) (4) (5) (6) £ £ £ £ £ £ 1904-5 . 36,859,681 634,238 36,225,443 3,402,575 1,434,057 41,062,075 1905-6 . 33,151,841 1,015,812 32,136,029 3,313,604 1,709,602 37,159,235 1906-7 . 31,472,087 1,094,309 30,377,778 2,431,201 1,790,562 34,599,541 1907-8 . 31,251,156 1,214,402 30,036,754 1,083,663 1,615,350 32,735,767 1908-9 . 32,181,309 1,264,033130,917,276 948,262 1,646,181 33,511,719 1909-10 . 35,734,015 1,325,808 34,408,207 — 1,651,445 36,059,652 1910-11 . 40,419,330 1,322,752 39,096,584 — 2,022,084 41,118,668 1911-12 . 42,414,257 1,322,752 41,091,505 — 1,970,084 43,061,589 1912-13 . 44,933,169 1,322,752 43,610,417 — 1,863,892 45,474,309 1913-14 (estimated) 48,809,300 1,311,558 47,497,742 — 2,023,894 49,521,636 1914-15 (estimated) 51,600,000 1,311,658 50,338,442 — 2,000,000 52,338,442 Since 1904-5 our naval expenditure has increased by £11,200,000. These figures, however, in their turn are A SENSE OF PROPORTION 233 vitiated by the fact, always overlooked by those who talk of the recent rise in naval expenditure, that prices have risen very greatly since 1904-5, while the pay of our sailors has been increased by the present Government. Let us take the increase in naval expenditure since 1904-5 and correct it for the rise in prices and pay. The following statement approxi- mately represents the facts of the case : Increase in Naval Expendittjbe since 1904-5 Tear. Gross Naval Expenditure. The Same Corrected for Rise In Prices and Pay. 1904-5 1914-15 . £ 41,100,000 52,300,000 £ 41,100,000 47,300,000 * £11,200,000 £6,200,000 Apparent increase. True increase. • This figure means that If prices and pay had remained at the level of 1904, the naval expenditure of 1913-14 would be £47,300,000 instead of £52,:j00,000. Neglecting prices and pay, naval expendi- ture in 1904-5 to 1914-15 has increased by £11,200,000. Taking these important items into account, it has increased by no more than £6,200,000. It matters very little, however, whether the £6,200,000 or the £11,200,000 be taken into comparison, or whether, in order to get the most alarmist view of the situation, we un- justly compare 1914-15 with 1907-8, and, 234 THE ROAD TO RUIN most unreasonably neglecting the rise in prices and pay, put it that our gross naval ex- penditure in the last seven years has risen by £19,500,000. Any of these figures, or all of them, ought to be considered in relation to the resources of the nation, and when that is done, any of them or all of them appear what they are — insignificant fractions of the national income. That is not to justify one penny of the increase, or, for that matter, to justify one farthing of the expenditure of £52,300,000. If we do not want a Navy, then not a fraction of. the whole, but the whole, is waste. If we do want a Navy, on the other hand, it is childish to say that we cannot afford it, or that the maintenance of it brings us anywhere near to ruin or disaster. This country can as easily afford a £50,000,000 Navy as a middle- class man can afford to buy what is now irreverently called a push-bicycle. Argument that we do not want a Navy, or that the Navy is much too large, or a little too large, may or may not hold water. What is absolutely clear is that if we want it, we can affoi'd it. It is not my purpose here either to argue for or against a Navy, or for or against any particular degree of naval defence whatsoever. A SENSE OF PROPORTION 235 I confine myself solely to the point : 7^ the present cost of our defences beyond our means ? The main argument used against the Navy Estimates is that they are bringing us to ruin, and my contention here is that such a sug- gestion is without reasonable foundation. It is the fact that Britain spends more on new motor-cars than on new battleships. It is the fact that, according to the estimate of The Times' motor expert, the purchase and maintenance in this country of motor pleasure vehicles cost £75,000,000 a year. (It may be observed that whereas in the last ten years the Navy has only cost the few gallant lives lost in submarines, etc., motor vehicles have slain thousands and maimed tens of thousands ; but let that pass here, although I am astonished that it passes so easily with those who oppose our defences on the score of humanity.) It is the fact that we spend on non-intoxi- cating beverages far more than the entire cost of the Army and Navy. It is the fact that we spend on intoxicants more than twice the cost of the Army and Navy. It is the fact that the rich spend on luxuries (which create highly variable trades) many times the cost of the Army and Navy. It is the fact that in 1913 the British invest- 236 THE ROAD TO RUIN ing classes made an unparalleled investment in publicly issued securities, amounting roundly to £250,000,000, and that — oh ! most monstrous disproportion !— £200,000,000 of this capital was invested abroad, lured by 6 per cent., while at home housing, canals, railways, afforestation, municipalities, and, above all, a national electrical power system, lacked the capital they needed. In one year the British investor could clear up the worst of the housing problem ; in a second year he could give the nation a scientific power supply which would recreate social and industrial life and multiply our wealth production again and again. Two or more blacks do not make a white, and none of these facts defends the Naval Estimates. Each of these facts, however, makes mincemeat of the argument that we cannot afford the Navy, and that its trifling increase in recent years brings us to the edge of a financial abyss. Each of them equally disposes of the mischievous notion that we cannot afford social reforms because of the cost of the Navy. The fact is that it is only too easy to forget the scale upon which the affairs of a great nation must be now conducted. Not long ago I heard it stated in the House of Commons, in a speech of considerable eloquence, that A SENSE OF PROPORTION 237 with a sum of money which need not be pre- cisely stated, but which amounted to a few hundred milHons, we could create a Utopia in this country. I fear it is true that a great many people are of this opinion, for commonly I observe that you have only to mention a million pounds to make people gasp, while to speak of ten or twenty millions leads to com- plete paralysis of their mental faculties. That is one of the disadvantages of belonging to a big country. If I were to write down that, having four dependents, and thus con- stituting with them the statistician's delightful average family of five persons, I had spent upon them, it matters not for what purpose, 5s. a head, no one would suspect me of extra- vagance, even though the 255. had been spent upon mere amusement. If, however, I were to write down a proposal that the Government of this country should spend £11,500,000 more in a year upon a great public purpose, a very large number of worthy people would imme- diately suffer a great disturbance of mental equilibrium, and ask where such a lot of money was to come from. But the "lot of money" is just 5s, per head of our popu- lation. A sense of proportion is a most difficult quality to cultivate, and it is to be feared that 238 THE ROAD TO RUIN there are few who possess it. It is the chief difficulty which stands in the path of the reformer, and it is the besetting sin of many of those who desire to be reformers. I am beginning to think that almost the first thing a child ought to be taught at school, as soon as it understands how to perform the process of simple multiplication, is to multiply the number of people in this country by various sums, large and small, so that the budding citizen may grasp the useful truth, never to be unlearned or forgotten, that forty- six times the merest trifle amounts to a big sum. A child so taught would not be likely to grow up into an adult easily dazzled by talk about millions in connection with questions of Government. If he heard a ranting politician endeavouring to startle an audience by telling them that this, that, or the other was costing five, ten, or fifty millions, he would smile, remembering that these sums for our big nation amount to only 2s. 2d., 45. 4