diminished in a less, but still considerable, proportion, the only articles in which the workman is specially interested which have risen are meat and house rent. And at the beginning of this period meat, which now enters largely into an English working man's diet, was almost unknown in that capacity, with the exception of bacon, which has not increased sensibly in price; while there is reason to believe that the increased house rent is merely the higher price for a superior article which the workman can afford.'

6

On the whole, Sir Robert Giffen considers it a moderate statement of an incontestable truth to say, that 'the increase of the money wages of the working man in the last fifty years corresponds to a real gain.'

And this increase of wages has coincided with a great diminution in the hours of work. Sir Robert Giffen observes that it is difficult or impossible to state with absolute precision the amount of this reduction in the United Kingdom, but he concludes from the data we possess that it is nearly 20 per cent. There has been at least this reduction in the textile, engineering, and house-building trades. The workman gets from 50 to 100 per

cent. more money for 20 per cent. less work.'

Other and not less decisive evidence is to be found in the returns of the savings banks, which represent more faithfully than, perhaps, any other test the savings of the wage-earning class. In the fifty years of which we are speaking the depositors in the savings banks of the United Kingdom multiplied nearly tenfold, and the amount of the deposits more than fivefold, while the population had not increased more than 30 per cent. In 1881, which is the last year on the lists of Sir Robert Giffen, the amount deposited in the savings banks amounted to the enormous sum of 80,334,0007. And this increase has taken place in spite of a

vast multiplication of the kind of investments in which the savings of poor men are chiefly placed. Giffen gives some statistics of the progress of industrial and provident co-operative societies in England and Wales. They extend only over the period from 1862 to 1881. In that short period the members of these societies rose from 90,000 to 525,000, and their capital from 428,0007. to 5,881,0007.

The reader may refer to the valuable paper I am quoting for further evidence on this subject. He will observe the marked decline in the amount of pauperism in all parts of the United Kingdom during the last fifty years, the reduction in the rate of mortality, and the increased duration of average life. These things do not, it is true, absolutely prove a general increase in material wellbeing, but they are at least wholly inconsistent with generally increasing misery. I shall not here follow Sir Robert Giffen in his very instructive examination of the proportionate share of the different classes in the great increase in national wealth, as shown on the one hand by the Income tax returns and the Probate duties, and on the other by the changes in the rate of wages. His conclusion may be given in his own words. It is that, allowing for the increase of population, the growth of capital and income-tax income is really much smaller than the growth of the money income of the working-classes; that the number of owners of personal property liable to probate duty has increased in the last fifty years more than the increase of population, and that, on an average, these owners are only about 15 per cent. richer than they were, while the individual income of the working classes has increased from 50 to 100 per cent.'

6

All this is compatible with the fact that there is still much that is deplorable in the condition of the work

ing classes, especially at the period when their strength has failed. It is compatible with the fact that, in the vast agglomerations of population that grow up around every great manufacture, there is always to be found a broad though, it is hoped, a diminishing fringe of abject poverty, misery, and vice. Drink, and vagrancy, and idle habits, criminal or at least vicious lives, imprudent marriages, and a total absence among great multitudes of all disposition to save, account for much. But much also springs from causes that bring with them no moral blame-from disease and the incapacity for work that follows it; from misfortunes which no human providence could have foreseen dissipating in a few weeks the savings of an industrious life; from the want of employment that too constantly follows great fluctuations in demand, great and sudden changes in the course of industry, or commerce, or population. Millions of human beings exist in the chief manufacturing countries who would never have been called into being if these manufactures had not been established, and in this vast increase of population there will always be too many sunk in misery. How strange it seems, a great writer once wrote, that the sternest sentence pronounced on the traitor of the Gospels was, that it had been better for him if he had never been born! common, to our finite wisdom, such a lot appears to be!

How

But though the field which lies open for philanthropic effort and judicious legislation is very large, the plain, palpable facts of English life are abundantly sufficient to prove the gross and enormous falsehood of the estimate which Marx has given of the effects of the growth of capital and the increase of machinery on the wellbeing of the labouring poor. The evidence of all other countries agrees with that of England, though in no other are the phenomena exhibited on so gigantic a

VOL. II.

21

scale. M. Leroy-Beaulieu has dealt with the Continental aspects of the question with a fulness and a competence that leave little to desire. He shows how, whenever one nation obtains a marked ascendency in any form of industry, whenever an extraordinary proportion of capital is attracted to its development, the invariable result will be that in this particular branch the level of the workmen's wages will be the highest. In a work published in 1881 he examines the history of working men's wages and expenditure in France during a period almost exactly coinciding with that which had been the subject of the inquiry of Sir Robert Giffen in England. France, of all Continental countries, most closely rivals England in wealth, but her industrial conditions are widely different. She differs greatly in the proportion which agriculture bears to manufacturing industry; she has not experienced, to the same degree, the revolution in the price of agricultural produce which has taken place in England, and her population increases more slowly than that of any other great Continental nation. Leroy - Beaulieu computes that in forty or fifty years the cost of life in a French working man's family has probably increased from 25 to 33 per cent., but that the generality of wages in France have risen at least from 80 to 100 per cent.1 In Paris, where capital is most largely agglomerated, real wages rose in the short period between 1875 and 1882 from 50 to 60 per cent. Between 1854 and 1876 the number of members of the Sociétés de Secours Mutuel increased from 315,000 to 901,000, and the sums invested in them rose from thirteen to seventy-six millions of francs.3 In 1882, the sums placed in the French savings banks

'La Répartition des Richesses, p. 453.

Le Collectivisme, p. 60.

La Répartition des Richesses, p. 478.

are officially stated to have amounted to 1,745 millions of francs. The whole annual saving of France is estimated by the best statisticians at something between one and a half and two milliards of francs-that is, between sixty and eighty millions sterling.'

Taking a wide survey of the subject, M. LeroyBeaulieu shows by a vast accumulation of evidence that the steady tendency in the great industrial centres of Europe is not, as the Socialists aver, towards greater disparity, but towards greater equality, of fortune. The number of colossal fortunes augments slowly, and they bear but an insignificant proportion to the great aggregate of wealth. The fall in the rate of interest; the effect of increased means of locomotion and of telegraphic intercourse in stimulating competition and destroying trade inequalities springing from advantages of situation or priority of knowledge; the rise of the joint-stock company system; the special severity with which periods of depression fall upon the large fortunes, all tend to diminish them, or at least to retard their progress. On the other hand, moderate and small fortunes have in the present century enormously multiplied, and in all countries which are in the stream of industrial progress the wages of the labourer have materially risen.2

1 Le Collectivisme, p. 237. If the reader desires later statistics, he will find them in the very remarkable chapter on the division of fortunes in France in La Tyrannie Socialiste of M. Guyot, pp. 102-6 (1893). M. Guyot speaks 'des 6 millions de livrets de caisses d'épargne, des 3 milliards qu'ils représentent; des 450 millions de la caisse d'épargne postale '; and he also

shows the enormous diffusion of small investments in the national funds and in the shares of the French railways.

2 See, too, a remarkable passage in which Professor Marshall shows how the strongest industrial forces of the time 'are telling on the side of the poorer classes as a whole relatively to the richer,' and how all the best tests that can be