◆¹ Perhaps then a third explanation will be suggested. These differences will be said to be due to differences in the hours of labour. But a moment’s consideration will show that that has nothing to do with the problem; for when a million people in this country produced half what they produce to-day, they had fewer holidays, and they worked longer hours. Now that they have doubled the annual produce, they take practically four weeks less in producing it.[22] Again, the hours of labour for the manufacturing classes are in Switzerland twenty-six per cent longer at the present time than in this country; and yet the annual product, in proportion to the number of operatives, is twenty-eight per cent less.[23]
Agriculture gives us examples of the same discrepancy between the labour expended and the value of the result obtained. In France, the agricultural population is three times what it is in this country, but the value of the agricultural produce is not so much as double.[24]
◆1 But are causes of some other kind which lie below the surface,
Plainly, therefore, the growth of a nation’s income, under modern conditions, does not depend on an increased expenditure of labour. There might, indeed, seem some ground for leaping to the contrary conclusion—that it grows in proportion as the hours of labour are limited: but whatever incidental truth there may be in that contention, it does not explain the main facts we are dealing with; for some of the most rapid changes in the incomes of nations we find have occurred during periods when the hours of labour remained unaltered; and we find at the present moment that countries in which the hours of labour are the same, differ even more, in point of income, from one another than they differ from countries in which the hours of labour are different. ◆¹ Whatever, therefore, the causes of such differences may be, they are not simple and superficial causes like these.
◆1 And which requires to be carefully searched for.
I have alluded to the incomes of foreign countries only for the sake of throwing more light on the income of our own. Let us again turn to that. Half of that income, as we have seen, consists to-day of an annual product new since the time when men still in their prime were children; and this mysterious addition to our wealth has rapidly and silently developed itself, without one person in a thousand being aware of its extent, or realising the operation of any new forces that might account for it. Let people of middle age look back to their own childhood; and the England of that time, in aspects and modes of life, will not seem to them very different from what it seems now. Let them turn over a book of John Leech’s sketches, which appeared in Punch about the time of the first Exhibition; and, putting aside a few changes in feminine fashion, they will see a faithful representation of the life that still surrounds them. The street, the drawing-room, the hunting-field, the railway-station—nothing will be obsolete, nothing out-of-date. Nothing will suggest that since these sketches were made any perceptible change has come over the conditions of our civilisation. And yet, somehow or other, some changes have taken place, owing to which our income has nearly doubled itself. ◆¹ In other words, the existence of one-half of our wealth is due to causes, the nature, the presence, and the operation of which, are hidden so completely beneath the surface of life as to escape altogether the eye of ordinary observation, and reveal themselves only to careful and deliberate search.
◆1 For, unless we understand the causes which have made our national income grow, we may, by interfering with them unknowingly, make our income decrease:
◆¹ The practical moral of all this is obvious: that just as our income has doubled itself without our being aware of the causes, and almost without our being aware of the fact, so unless we learn what the causes are, and are consequently able to secure for them fair play, or, at all events, to avoid interfering with their operation, we may lose what we have gained even more quickly than we have gained it, and annihilate the larger part of what we are desirous to distribute. We have seen that the national income is a living thing; and, as is the case with other living things, the principles of its growth reside in parts of the body which are themselves not sensitive to pain, but which may for the moment be deranged and injured with impunity, and will betray their injury only by results which arise afterwards, and which may not be perceived till it is too late to remedy them.
◆1 And this is the danger of reckless social legislation.
◆¹ Here lies the danger of reckless social legislation, and even of the reckless formation of vague public opinion; for public opinion, in a democratic country like ours, is legislation in its nebular stage: and hence the only way to avert this danger is, first to do what we have just now been doing,—to consider the amount and character of the wealth with which we have to deal,—and secondly, to examine the causes to which the production of this wealth has been due, and on which the maintenance of its continued production must depend.