Contemporary Socialism Part 15

[9] Roscher's "Finanz-Wissenschaft," p. 63.

[10] For proof of the position that the rate of wages is determined by the amount of production, see pp. 307-11.

CHAPTER XII.

THE AGRARIAN SOCIALISM OF HENRY GEORGE.

Mr. George sent his "Progress and Poverty" into the world with the remarkable prediction that it would find not only readers but apostles.

"Whatever be its fate," he says, "it will be read by some who in their heart of hearts have taken the cross of a new crusade.... The truth I have tried to make clear will not find easy acceptance. If that could be, it would have been accepted long ago. If that could be, it would never have been obscured. But it will find friends--those who will toil for it, suffer for it: if need be, die for it. This is the power of the truth" (p. 393). Mr. George's prediction is not more remarkable than its fulfilment. His work has had an unusually extensive sale; a hundred editions in America, and an edition of 60,000 copies in this country are sufficient evidences of that; but the most striking feature in its reception is precisely that which its author foretold; it created an army of apostles, and was enthusiastically circulated, like the testament of a new dispensation. Societies were formed, journals were devised to propagate its saving doctrines, and little companies of the faithful held stated meetings for its reading and exposition. It was carried as a message of consolation to the homes of labour. The author was hailed as a new and better Adam Smith, as at once a reformer of science and a renovator of society. Smith unfolded "The Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations," but to Mr. George, we were told, was reserved the greater part of unravelling "the nature and causes of the poverty of nations," and if the obsolete science of wealth had served to make England rich, the young science of poverty was at length to make her people happy with the money. Justice and Liberty were to begin their reign, and our eyes were to see--to quote Mr. George's own words--"the City of G.o.d on earth, with its walls of jasper and its gates of pearl"

(p. 392).

The fervour of this first reception may--as was perhaps only natural--have suffered some abatement since, but it affords a striking proof how largely modern society is disquieted by the results of our vaunted industrial civilization. Even those amongst us who are most unwilling to disparage the improvement that has really taken place during the last hundred years in the circ.u.mstances of the people, still cannot help feeling that the improvement has fallen far short of what might have been reasonably expected from the contemporaneous growth of resources and productive power. But numbers of people will not allow that any improvement has occurred at all, and deliver themselves to an unhappy and unwarranted pessimism on the whole subject. Because industrial progress has not extinguished poverty, they conclude that it has not even lessened it; that it has no power to lessen it; nay, that its real tendency is to aggravate it, that it increases wealth with the one hand, but increases want with the other, so that civilization has developed into a purely upper-cla.s.s feast, where the rich are grossly overfilled with good things, and the poor are sent always emptier and emptier away. Invention, they tell us, has followed invention; machinery has multiplied the labourer's productivity at least tenfold; new colonies have been founded, new markets and channels of commerce opened in every quarter of the globe; gold-fields have been discovered, free trade has been introduced, railways and ocean steamers have shortened time and s.p.a.ce themselves in our service. Each and all of these things have excited hopes of introducing an era of popular improvement, and each and all of them have left these hopes unfulfilled. They think, therefore, they now do well to despair, and they fortify themselves in their gloom by citing the opinion of Mr. Mill, that "it is questionable whether all the mechanical inventions yet made have lightened the day's toil of any human being," without observing that Mr. Mill immediately follows up that opinion by expressing the confident a.s.surance that it was "in the nature and the futurity" of these inventions to effect that improvement. These gloomy views have in France received the name of _Sisyphism_, because they represent the working cla.s.s under the present industrial system as being struck with a curse like that of Sisyphus, always encouraged by fresh technical advantages to renewed expectations, and always doomed to see their expectations perish for ever.

Now, it was upon these despondent and burdened souls that Mr. George counted so confidently, and, as time has shown, so correctly, for his apostles and martyrs; and he counted so confidently upon them because he had himself borne their sorrows, and drunk of their despair, and because he now believed most entirely that his discoveries would bring "inexpressible cheer" to their minds, as, in the same circ.u.mstances, they had already brought inexpressible cheer to his own. "When I first realized," he says, "the squalid misery of a great city"--that is, of the latest and most characteristic product of industrial development--"it appalled and tormented me, and would not let me rest for thinking of what caused it and how it could be cured" (p. 395).

Poverty seemed to him to be most abounding and most intense in precisely the most advanced countries in the world. "Where the conditions to which material progress everywhere tends are most fully realized--that is to say, where population is densest, wealth greatest, and the machinery of production and exchange most highly developed--we find the deepest poverty, the sharpest struggle for existence, and the most enforced idleness" (p. 4). Nay, poverty, he thought, seemed "to take a darker aspect" in every community at the very moment when it might be reasonably expected to brighten--at the moment when the community made a distinct advance in material civilization, when "closer settlements and a more intimate connection with the rest of the world and greater utilization of labour-saving machinery make possible greater economies in production and exchange, and wealth increases in consequence, not merely in the aggregate, but in proportion to population" (p. 4). This process of impoverishment might, he says, escape observation in an old country, because such a country has generally contained from time immemorial a completely impoverished cla.s.s, who could not be further impoverished without going out of existence altogether, but in a new settlement like California, where he resided, poverty might be seen almost in the act of being produced by progress before one's very eyes.

While the colony had nothing better than log cabins or cloth shanties, "there was no dest.i.tution," though there might be no luxury. But "the tramp comes with the locomotive, and alm-houses and prisons are as surely the marks of 'material progress' as are costly dwellings, rich warehouses, and magnificent churches" (p. 4). "In the United States it is clear that squalor and misery, and the vices and crimes that spring from them everywhere, increase as the village grows to the city, and the march of development brings the advantages of improved methods of production and exchange. It is in the older and richer sections of the Union that pauperism and distress are becoming most painfully apparent.

If there is less deep poverty in San Francisco than in New York, it is not because San Francisco is yet behind New York in all that both cities are striving for? When San Francisco reaches the point where New York now is, who can doubt that there will also be ragged and barefooted children in her streets?" (p. 6). The prospect alarmed and agitated him profoundly. It deprived him, as it has deprived so many of the continental socialists, of all religious belief, for if the real order of things make an ever-deepening poverty to be the only destiny of the ma.s.s of mankind, it seemed vain to dream of a controlling Providence or an immortal life. "It is difficult," says he, "to reconcile the idea of human immortality with the idea that nature wastes men by constantly bringing them into being where there is no room for them. It is impossible to reconcile the idea of an intelligent and beneficent Creator with the belief that the wretchedness and degradation, which are the lot of such a large proportion of human kind, result from His enactments; while the idea that man mentally and physically is the result of slow modifications perpetuated by heredity, irresistibly suggests the idea that it is the race life, not the individual life, which is the object of human existence. Thus has vanished with many of us, and is still vanishing with more of us, that belief which in the battles and ills of life affords the strongest support and deepest consolation" (p. 396).

The inquiry Mr. George undertook was consequently one of the most vital personal concern to himself, and we are glad to think that it has been the means of restoring to him the faith and hope he prizes so much. "Out of this inquiry," he tells us, "has come to me something I did not think to find, and a faith that was dead revives" (p. 395).

It may be ungracious to disturb a peace won so sorely and offered so sincerely to others, but the truth is, Mr. George has simply lost his faith by one illusion and recovered it again by another. He first tormented his brain with imaginary facts, and has then restored it with erroneous theories. His argument is really little better than a prolonged and, we will own, athletic beating of the air; but since both the imaginary facts and the erroneous theories of which it is composed have obtained considerable vogue, it is well to subject it to a critical examination. I shall therefore take up successively, first, his problem; second, his scientific explanation; and third, his practical remedy.

I. _Mr. George's Problem._

He states his problem thus:--"I propose to seek the law which a.s.sociates poverty with progress and increases want with advancing wealth" (p. 8).

The first rule of scientific investigation is to prove one's fact before proceeding to explain it. "There are more false facts than false theories in the world," and a short examination whether a phenomenon actually exists may often relieve us from a long search after its law.

Mr. George, however, does not observe this rule. He seeks for the law of a phenomenon without first verifying the phenomenon itself--nay, apparently without so much as suspecting that it ought to be verified.

He a.s.sumes a particular view of the social situation to be correct, because he a.s.sumes it. But his a.s.sumption is a purely subjective and, as will presently be shown, delusive impression. We imagine our train to be going back when a parallel train is going faster forward, and we are apt to take the general condition of mankind to be retrograding when we fix our eyes exclusively on the rapid and remarkable enrichment of the fortunate few. What Mr. George calls "the great enigma of our time" is just the enigma of the apparently receding train, and he proceeds to solve it by coiling himself in a corner and working out an elaborate explanation from his own inner consciousness "by the methods of political economy," instead of taking the simple and obvious precaution of looking out of the opposite carriage-window and testing, by hard facts, whether his impression was correct. Had he taken this precaution, had he resorted to an examination of the actual state of the facts, he would have found good reason to change his impression; he would have found that on the whole poverty is not increasing, that in proportion to population it is considerably less in the more advanced industrial countries than in the less advanced ones, and that he had simply mistaken unequal rates of progress for simultaneous movements of progress and decline. His impression, it must be admitted, is a prejudice of considerable currency; there are many who tell us, as he does, that want is growing _pari pa.s.su_ with wealth, and even gaining on it; that if the rich are getting richer, the poor are at the same time getting poorer; but it is a question of fact, and yet no one has ever seriously tried to prove the a.s.sertion by an appeal to fact. That Mr.

George should have neglected to submit it to such a test is the more remarkable, because he was, as he has told us, "tormented" in mind by it, and because he acknowledges that it is a "paradox"--_i.e._, against the reason of the case, and that it is also, to some extent at least, against appearances. He owns, for example, that "the average of comfort, leisure, and refinement has been raised," and that though the lowest cla.s.s may not share in these gains, yet even they have in some ways improved. "I do not mean," he says, "that the condition of the lowest cla.s.s has nowhere nor in anything been improved, but that there is nowhere any improvement which can be credited to increased productive power. I mean that the tendency of what we call material progress is in no wise to improve the condition of the lowest cla.s.s in the essentials of healthy, happy human life. Nay, more, that it is to still further depress the condition of the lowest cla.s.s. The new forces, elevating in their nature though they be, do not act upon the social fabric from underneath, as was for a long time hoped and believed, but strike it at a point intermediate between top and bottom. It is as though an immense wedge were being forced, not underneath society, but through society.

Those who are above the point of separation are elevated, but those who are below are crushed down" (p. 5). From this pa.s.sage it would appear that, according to Mr. George, the condition of all except the lowest cla.s.s has improved _in consequence of_ material progress, and that the condition of the lowest cla.s.s has improved _in spite of_ it. He does not undertake, it seems, to affirm of any cla.s.s that it has, as a matter of actual fact, become impoverished in the course of social development, but only that there is a tendency in the increase of productive power--in "the new productive forces"--in "material progress"--to impoverish the lower strata of society. But then he contends that these forces are practising exactly the same tendency on some of the highest strata, on cla.s.ses that we know have been growing richer and richer every day. For he tells us that these new forces, entering our social system like a wedge, depress all who happen to be on the wrong side; and we shall presently discover that this unhappy company on the wrong side of the wedge embraces many groups of persons who will be excessively astonished to learn that they are there. It includes, not only the poor labourers who live on wages, but the great capitalists who live on profits; the great cotton spinners, ironmasters, brewers, bankers, contractors; the very men, in short, of all the world, whom the new productive forces have most conspicuously and enormously enriched. I shall revert to this preposterous conclusion later on, but at present it is enough to say that a tide, which so many have swum against and swum to fortune, cannot be very formidable, and at all events can furnish no clue whatever to the possible condition of those who are exposed to it.

For that we have only one resort. It is a plain question of fact--is poverty really increasing? Are the poor really getting poorer? And this can only be competently decided by the ordinary inductive evidence of facts. The data of this kind which we possess for settling the question may not be so exact as would be desirable, but there is no higher tribunal to which we can appeal. The question must be answered by them, or not answered at all.

Now any data we have all conduct to the conclusion that poverty is not increasing. If poverty were increasing with the increase of wealth, it would show itself either in an increase of pauperism, or in a decline in the general standard of living among the labouring cla.s.ses, or in a fall in the average duration of life, and these symptoms would be most acute in the countries that are most wealthy and progressive. Now, let us take England as a crucial case of a country in a very advanced stage of industrial development. Is English pauperism greater now than it was before the "new productive forces" entered the country? Is the general standard of living among the labouring cla.s.ses lower? Is the average duration of life less? Are poverty and the various symptoms of poverty more acute in England than in more backward countries?

In a foot-note to the pa.s.sage last quoted from his book, Mr. George explains that the improvement he recognises in the lot of the lowest cla.s.s does not consist in greater ability to obtain the necessaries of life. Does he mean, because more things are now reckoned among the necessaries of life? If so, we fear there is no chance of that difficulty being removed, nor indeed is there any reason for desiring it to be so. Men's wants will always increase with their incomes, and the struggle to make both ends meet may in that case indefinitely continue.

But the fact remains that they have more wants satisfied than before, that they realize a higher standard of life, and that is the mark, and indeed the substance, of a more diffused comfort and civilization. It is true that as the general standard of living rises, people feel the pinch of poverty at a higher level than before, and become pauperized for the want of comforts that are now necessary, but which formerly few ever dreamt of possessing. To have no shoes is a mark of extreme indigence to-day; it was the common lot a century ago. People may be growing in general comfort, and yet their ability to obtain necessaries remain stationary, because their customary circle of necessaries may be always widening. The real sign of an advancing poverty is when the circle of recognised necessaries is getting narrow, and yet men have more difficulty in obtaining them than before; in other words, 1st, when the average scale of living falls; and 2nd, when a larger proportion of the people are unable to obtain it, reduced though it be. Now, in England, the contrary has happened; the general standard of living has risen, and the proportion of those who are unable to obtain it has declined.

In a preceding chapter I adduced evidence to show how greatly improved the working-cla.s.s standard of living now is from what it was two hundred years ago, in the good old times socialist writers like to sing of, when men had not yet sought out many inventions and the world was not oppressed by the large system of production. But let us tap the line between then and now at what point we may, and we find the same result; the tendency is always to a better style of living. Mr. Giffen, for example, in his address, as President of the Statistical Society, on 20th November, 1883, compares the condition of the working cla.s.ses to-day with their condition half a century since, and concludes from official returns that while the sovereign goes as far as it did then in the purchase of commodities, money wages have increased from 30 to 100 per cent., and, at the same time, the hours of labour have been reduced some 20 per cent. Except butcher-meat and house-rent, every other element of the working man's expenditure is cheaper, and butcher-meat was fifty years ago hardly an element of his expenditure at all, and the kind of house he then occupied was much inferior, as a rule, to what he occupies now, bad as the latter may in many cases be.

But while the general standard of comfort has been rising, the proportion of the population who are unable to obtain it has been diminishing. I have already stated that King estimated the number of persons in receipt of relief in England and Wales in 1688 at 900,000.

Now in 1882 the average number in receipt of relief at one and the same time was, according to official returns, 803,719; and if we are right in doubling that figure to find the whole number of paupers relieved in the course of the year (that being the proportion borne in Scotland), then we may conclude that there are some 1,600,000 paupers in England and Wales at the present day. That is to say, with nearly five times the population, we have less than twice the pauperism. The result is far from being entirely gratifying; a million and a half of paupers (with more than half as many again in Ireland and Scotland) const.i.tute a very grave problem, or rather ganglion of problems; but the fact supplies a decisive enough refutation of the pessimist idea that the actual movement of pauperism has been one of increase instead of one of decrease.

During these two hundred years there is no period in which wealth and productive power multiplied more rapidly than the last thirty years, and, therefore, if Mr. George's ideas were correct, there is no period that should show such a marked increase of pauperism. What do we find?

We find that pauperism has steadily declined in England during that period. The decrease has been gradual and attended with no such striking interruptions as were frequently exhibited in former times. But the most remarkable feature about it is that the number of able-bodied paupers has diminished by nearly a half; from 201,644 in 1849 to 106,280 in 1882. That is the very cla.s.s of paupers whom Mr. George represents it to be the special effect of increasing productive power to multiply, and yet, though wealth and productive power have made almost unexampled progress, and though the population has also considerably risen in the interval, we have not more than half as many of this cla.s.s of paupers now as we had thirty years ago. No doubt this result is due in part to a better system of administering relief, just as it is due in part to the growth of trade unions and friendly societies, to the extension of savings banks, and to other agencies. But if Mr. George's principle is true, could such a result have taken place at all? If "material progress" has a tendency to multiply "tramps" or able-bodied paupers, the tendency must be weak, indeed, when a little judicious management on the part of public bodies, or of working men themselves, would not only counteract it, but turn the current so strongly the other way. But the truth is that the "tramp" has never been so little of a care in this country as at the present hour, and that it is to material progress we owe his disappearance. He was a very serious problem to our ancestors for centuries and centuries. The whole history of our social legislation is a history of ineffectual attempts to deal with vagrants and st.u.r.dy beggars, and we are less troubled with them now mainly because industrial progress has given them immensely more opportunities of making an honest and regular living. Industrial progress has all along been creating work and annihilating tramps, but it has all along been followed by absurd and perverse complaints like Mr. George's, that it was only creating tramps and annihilating opportunities of work. Mr.

George says the tramp comes with the locomotive, but a writer in 1673 (quoted by Sir F. Eden, "State of the Poor," I., 190) declared that he came with the stage-coach. He pictures the happy age before stage-coaches, when (as Mr. George says of California) there might be no luxury, but there was no dest.i.tution, when every man kept one horse for himself and another for his groom. But with the introduction of the stage-coach the scene was changed. People got anywhere for a few shillings, and ceased to keep horses. They were so much the richer themselves, but their grooms were ruined and thrown upon the world without horse or home. Now cla.s.s privations like these are incidental to industrial transformations, and in an age of unusual industrial transitions like ours, they may be expected to be unusually numerous.

But the effect of material progress on the whole is to prevent such privations rather than cause them. It multiplies temporary redundancies of labour, but it multiplies still more the opportunities for permanently relieving them. Why are we now free from the old scourges of famine and famine prices? Partly because of free trade, but mainly because of improved communications, because of the steamer and the locomotive. Even commercial crises are getting less severe in their effects. The distress among our labouring cla.s.ses during the American Civil War was nothing compared with the suffering under the complete paralysis of industry that followed the close of the great continental war in 1815. Miss Martineau tells us of that time:--"The poor abandoned their residences, whole parishes were deserted, and crowds of paupers, increasing in numbers as they went from parish to parish, spread wider and wider this awful desolation." (History of England, I. 39.) No such severe redundancy of labour has taken place since then, and the redundancies that attend changes of fashion or of mechanical agency, though they undoubtedly const.i.tute a serious difficulty, are yet lightened and not aggravated by the various and complex ramifications of modern industry. Except a new colony, there is no place where new-comers are so easily taken on as in a highly developed industrial country.

There are more poor in Norway than in England, and they are increasing; yet in Norway there is no rent and no great cities. Mr. George may say, and in fact he does say, that in old countries the number of paupers is reduced by simple starvation; but if that were so, the death-rate would be increasing. But in England the death-rate is really diminishing. Let us again quote from Mr. Giffen's address:--"Mr. Humphreys, in his able paper on 'The Recent Decline in the English Death-Rate,' showed conclusively that the decline in the death-rate in the last five years, 1876-80, as compared with the rates on which Dr. Farr's English Life Table was based--rates obtained in the years 1841-45--amounted to from 28 to 32 per cent. in males at each quinquennial of the 20 years, 5-25, and in females at each quinquennial from 5-25, to between 24 and 35 per cent.; and that the effect of this decline in the death-rate was to raise the mean duration of life among males from 39.9 to 41.9 years, a gain of two years in the average duration of life. Mr. Humphreys also showed that by far the larger proportion of the increased duration of human life in England was lived at useful ages, and not at the dependent ages of either childhood or old age. No such change could have taken place without a great increase in the vitality of the people. Not only had fewer died, but the ma.s.ses who had lived must have been healthier and suffered less from sickness than they did. From the nature of the figures also the improvement must also have been among the ma.s.ses, and not among a select cla.s.s whose figures threw up the average. The improvement, too, actually recorded obviously related to a transition stage. Many of the improvements in the condition of the working cla.s.ses had only taken place quite recently. They had not, therefore, affected all through their existence any but the youngest lives. When the improvements had been in existence for a longer period, so that the lives of all who are living had been affected from birth by the changed conditions, we might infer that even a greater gain in the mean duration of life will be shown. As it was the gain was enormous. Whether it was due to better and more abundant food and clothing, to better sanitation, to better knowledge of medicine, or to these and other causes combined, improvement had beyond all question occurred." The decline of pauperism in this country then is not due to any increasing mortality in the cla.s.ses from which the majority of the paupers come; but it is one among many other proofs that these cla.s.ses have profited, like their neighbours, by the course of material progress. They may not have profited in the same degree as some others, or in the degree we think desirable and believe to be yet possible for themselves. But they have profited. The situation is really, as we have said, one of unequal rates of progress, and not one of simultaneous progress and decline.

And this Mr. George seems, at a later stage of his argument, freely to admit. For when he comes to state "the law which a.s.sociates poverty with progress and increases want with advancing wealth," he explains that he does not contend that poverty is a.s.sociated with progress at all, but only that a lessening proportion of the gross produce of society falls to some cla.s.ses; that want may possibly not in the least increase with advancing wealth; that all cla.s.ses may be the wealthier for the growth of wealth; and practically, that the only evidence of the poverty of the poor is the greater richness of the rich. It seems he is not explaining in any wise why the poor are getting poorer, but only why they are not getting rich so fast as some of their neighbours. We must quote chapter and verse for this extraordinary vacillation about the very problem he wants to solve. "Perhaps," he says, in the last paragraph of Book III., chapter vi. (p. 154), "it may be well to remind the reader, before closing this chapter, of what has been before stated--that I am using the word wages, not in the sense of a quant.i.ty, but in the sense of a proportion. When I say that wages fall as rent rises, I do not mean that the quant.i.ty of wealth obtained by labourers as wages is necessarily less, but that the proportion which it bears to the whole produce is necessarily less. The proportion may diminish while the quant.i.ty remains the same, or even increases. If the margin of cultivation descends from the productive point, which we will call twenty-five, to the productive point we will call twenty, the rent of all lands that before paid rent will increase by this difference, and the proportion of the whole produce which goes to labourers as wages will to the same extent diminish; but if in the meantime the advance of the arts or economies that become possible with greater population have so increased the productive power of labour that at twenty the same exertion will produce as much wealth as before at twenty-five, labourers will get as wages as great a quant.i.ty as before, and the relative fall of wages will not be noticeable in any diminution of the necessaries or comforts of the labourer, but only in the increased value of land and the greater comforts and more lavish expenditure of the rent-receiving cla.s.s." It thus turns out that the alleged impoverishment of the labouring cla.s.ses through the increasing wealth of society--the sad and desolating spectacle that "tormented" Mr. George, "so that he could not rest"--the cruel mystery that robbed him even of his religious faith, and moved him to write his powerful but inconclusive book--this was no real impoverishment at all, but only an apparent one. It is not so much as "noticeable" in "any diminution of the necessaries or comforts of the labourer"; it is noticeable only in "the greater comforts and more lavish expenditure of the rent-receiving cla.s.s." The poverty of the labourer consists in the greater wealth of the landlord. The poor are not poorer; they only seem poorer, because certain of the rich have got so much richer. The problem is thus, on Mr. George's own showing, just the mock problem of the apparently receding train.

But let us take up this new issue. Mr. George's a.s.sertion now is that wages are a less proportion of the gross produce of the country than they were, because rent absorbs a correspondingly larger proportion than it did. Is that so? Mr. George does not think of showing that it is: he a.s.sumes it, without apparently having the smallest pretence of fact for his a.s.sertion. His a.s.sumption is entirely wrong. Rent is a much smaller proportion of the gross produce of the country than it was, and wages are not only in their aggregate a larger proportion of the aggregate produce of the country, but in their average a larger proportion of the _per capita_ production. There is no need to rest in random a.s.sumptions on the matter. The gross annual produce of the United Kingdom is reckoned at present at twelve hundred millions sterling, and the rent of the land at less than seventy millions, or about one seventeenth of the whole. In the time of King and Davenant, 200 years ago or so, the annual produce of England and Wales was forty-three millions, and the rent of land ten millions--little less than one-fourth. (Davenant's Works, iv., 71.) It is hardly worth while, however, making a formal a.s.sertion of so self-evident a proposition as that rent const.i.tutes a much smaller fraction of the national income now that wealth is invested so vastly in trade and manufactures, than it did when agriculture was the one great business of life: but it is perhaps better worth showing that rent does not absorb a greater proportion even of the agricultural produce of the country than it used to do. Rent has risen nearly 200 per cent. in the course of the last hundred years, but it does not take one whit a larger share of the gross produce of the land than it took then.

According to the calculations of Davenant and King, the gross produce of agriculture amounted, at the time of the Revolution, to four rents, or, allowing for t.i.thes, to three rents; but this was only on the arable.

The produce of other land, natural pasture and forest land and the like, came to less than two rents; so that while the rent of arable was not more than a third of the produce (or, to state it exactly, 27 per cent.), the rent of land generally was more nearly a half. The figures are--

Gross Produce. Rent.

Arable Land 9,079,000 2,480,000 Other Land 12,000,000 7,000,000 ----------- ---------- Total 21,079,000 9,480,000

(Davenant's Works, iv., 70.) Arthur Young, a century later, declares that the doctrine of three rents was already exploded, and that farmers had begun to expend so much on high cultivation that they would be very ill content if they produced no more than three rents. In fact, he declares that even in former times rent could never have amounted to a third of the produce, except on lands of the very first quality, and that a fourth was more probably the average proportion. In his "Political Arithmetic," published in 1779 (Part II., pp. 27, 31), he estimated the gross agricultural produce of England (exclusive of Wales) at 72,826,827, and the gross agricultural rental at 19,200,000, or 26 per cent.,--very nearly one-fourth of the produce. To come down nearer our own time, M'Culloch estimated the gross agricultural produce of England and Wales in 1842-3 to have been 141,606,857, and the gross agricultural rental 37,795,906, or 26 per cent. of the produce.

("Statistical Account of the British Empire," 3rd Edition, p. 553.) The gross, agricultural produce of the United Kingdom is now 270 millions sterling, and the gross agricultural rental 70 millions. Mr. Mulhall, indeed, estimates it at only 58 millions; but at 70 millions it would be, as nearly as possible, 26 per cent.,--curiously enough the same figure exactly as in 1843 and in 1779, and almost the same as in 1689.

So far of rent; now as to wages. I have already, in a former chapter (p.

301), produced some evidence to show that the average labourer's wages bears a higher proportion to the average income of the country than it did in former times, or, in other words, that the labourer enjoys a higher _per capita_ share of the gross annual produce of the country as measured in money, and I need not repeat that evidence here. Mr. Mulhall has made some calculations which confirm the conclusions there drawn.

("Dictionary of Statistics," p. 246.) He compares the income of the people of the United Kingdom at the three epochs of 1688, 1800, and 1883. He divides the people into cla.s.ses and numbers them by families, stating the total income of each cla.s.s and the total number of families among whom it was divided. I select the two columns containing the results for the whole population and the results for the working cla.s.s.

(1) Number of Families:--

A.D. 1688. A.D. 1800. A.D. 1883.

Whole Nation 1,200,000 1,780,000 6,575,000 Working Cla.s.s 759,000 1,117,000 4,629,000

(2) Earnings:--

A.D. 1688. A.D. 1880. A.D. 1883.

Whole } Nation} 45,000,000 230,000,000 1,265,000,000

Working} Cla.s.s } 11,000,000 78,000,000 447,000,000

A single glance at these tables will show that the aggregate wages of the country const.i.tutes a slightly better proportion of its aggregate annual income at present than in 1800, and a decidedly better proportion than in 1688. But if we look, not to the aggregate income of the cla.s.s, but to the average income of the individual families it contains, the result is in nowise more favourable to Mr. George's a.s.sumption. The following table will show that:--

(3) Average Income of Families:--

A.D. 1688. A.D. 1880. A.D. 1883.

Whole Nation 37 129 189 Working Cla.s.s 14 69 96

The average working-cla.s.s income was thus 37 per cent. of the average income of the country in 1688; 53 per cent. of it in 1800; and 51 per cent. of it in 1883. The difference between the last two epochs is so indecisive that we may count them practically identical. The real position of affairs then as to the proportion of wages to national produce is this, that wages enjoy a considerably larger share of that produce now than they did at the end of the seventeenth century, and about the same proportion as they enjoyed at the end of the eighteenth.

If, accordingly, Mr. George resolves to stick by the point of proportion, he would therefore have no more solid ground to stand on than on the point of quant.i.ty. Rent, as a proportion of the entire wealth of the country, has enormously declined, and even as a proportion, of agricultural wealth has not increased. Wages as a proportion have not declined, but rather risen.