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) constitute 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 class 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 class 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 sturdy 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 destitution, 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 class 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 classes 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 constitute 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 masses 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 masses, and not among a select class 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 classes 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 classes from which the majority of the paupers come; but it is one among many other proofs that these classes 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 associates poverty with progress and increases want with advancing wealth," he explains that he does not contend that poverty is associated with progress at all, but only that a lessening proportion of the gross produce of society falls to some classes; that want may possibly not in the least increase with advancing wealth; that all classes 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 quantity, but in the sense of a proportion. When I say that wages fall as rent rises, I do not mean that the quantity 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 quantity 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 quantity 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 class." It thus turns out that the alleged impoverishment of the labouring classes 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 class." 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 assertion 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 assumes it, without apparently having the smallest pretence of fact for his assertion. His assumption 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 assumptions 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 assertion of so self-evident a proposition as that rent constitutes 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 tithes, 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 Land12,000,0007,000,000
——————————
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 classes and numbers them by families, stating the total income of each class 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 class.

(1) Number of Families:—
A.D. 1688.A.D. 1800.A.D. 1883.
Whole Nation1,200,0001,780,0006,575,000
Working Class759,0001,117,0004,629,000
(2) Earnings:—
A.D. 1688.A.D. 1800.A.D. 1883.
Whole Nation£45,000,000 £230,000,000 £1,265,000,000
Working Class11,000,00078,000,000447,000,000