Labour and the Popular Welfare

by W. H. Mallock

And now let us turn from what Labour produces to what the labouring classes[43] have received at different dates within the ninety or hundred years in question. ◆¹ At the time of which we have just been speaking, they received about half of what we assume Labour to have produced. A labouring population of ten million people received annually about seventy million pounds.[44] Two generations later, the same number of people received in return for their labour about a hundred and sixty million pounds.[45] They were twenty-five per cent richer than they possibly could have been if, in 1795, they had seized on all the property in the kingdom and divided it amongst themselves. In other words, Labour in 1860, instead of receiving, as it did two generations previously, half of what we assume it to have produced, received twenty-five per cent more than it produced. If we turn from the year 1860 to the present time, we find that the gains of Labour have gone on increasing; and that each ten millions of the labouring classes to-day receives in return for its labour two hundred million pounds, or over forty per cent more than it produces. And all these calculations are based, the reader must remember, on the ridiculously exaggerated assumption which was made for the sake of argument, that in the days of Watt and Arkwright, Capital, Genius, and Ability had no share in production; and that all the wealth of the country, till the beginning of the present century, was due to the spontaneous efforts of common Labour alone.

◆1 The gains of Labour are put in a yet more striking light by comparing the present income of Labour with the total income of the country fifty years ago.

◆¹ And now let us look at the matter from a point of view slightly different, and compare the receipts of Labour not with what we assume it to have itself produced, but with the total product of the community at a certain very recent date.

In 1843, when Queen Victoria had been six or seven years on the throne, the gross income of the nation was in round numbers five hundred and fifteen million pounds. Of this, two hundred and thirty-five million pounds went to the labouring classes, and the remainder, two hundred and eighty million pounds, to the classes that paid income-tax. Only fifty years have elapsed since that time, and, according to the best authorities, the income of the labouring classes now is certainly not less than six hundred and sixty million pounds.[46] That is to say, it exceeds, by a hundred and forty-five million pounds, the entire income of the nation fifty years ago.

An allowance, however, must be made for the increase in the number of the labourers. That is of course obvious, and we will at once proceed to make it. But when it is made, the case is hardly less wonderful. The labouring classes in 1843 numbered twenty-six millions; at the present time they number thirty-three millions.[47] That is to say, they have increased by seven million persons. Now assuming, as we have done, that Labour by itself produces as much as fourteen pounds per head of the population, this addition of seven million persons will account for an addition of ninety-eight million pounds to the five hundred and fifteen million pounds which was the amount of the national income fifty years ago. We must therefore, to make our comparisons accurate, deduct ninety-eight million pounds from the hundred and forty-five million pounds just mentioned, which will leave us an addition of forty-seven million pounds. We may now say, without any reservation, that the labouring classes of this country, in proportion to their number, receive to-day forty-seven million pounds a year more than the entire income of the country at the beginning of the reign of Queen Victoria.

◆1 Every labourer anxious for his own welfare should reflect on these facts.

◆¹ To any labourer anxious for his own welfare, to any voter or politician of any kind, who realises that the welfare of the labourers is the foundation of national stability, and who seeks to discover by what conditions that welfare can be best secured and promoted, this fact which I have just stated is one that cannot be considered too closely, too seriously, or too constantly.

Let the reader reflect on what it means.

◆1 They show him that the existing system has done, and is doing for him far more than any Socialist ever promised.

Dreams of some possible social revolution, dreams of some division of property by which most of the riches of the rich should be abstracted from them and divided amongst the poor—these were not wanting fifty years ago. ◆¹ But even the most sanguine of the dreamers hardly ventured to hope that the then riches of the rich could be taken away from them completely; that a sum equal to the rent of the whole landed aristocracy, all the interest on Capital, all the profits of our commerce and manufactures, could be added to what was then the income of the labouring classes. No forces of revolution were thought equal to such a change as that. But what have the facts been? What has happened really? Within fifty years the miracle has taken place, or, indeed, one greater than that. The same number of labourers and their families as then formed the whole labouring population of the country now possess among them every penny of the amount that then formed the income of the entire nation. They have gained every penny that they possibly could have gained if every rich man of that period—if duke, and cotton lord, and railway king, followed by all the host of minor plutocrats, had been forced to cast all they had into the treasury of Labour, and give their very last farthing to swell the labourer’s wages. The labourers have gained this; but that is not all. They have gained an annual sum of forty-seven million pounds more. And they have done all this, not only without revolution, but without any attack on the fundamental principles of property. On the contrary, the circumstances which have enabled Labour to gain most from the proceeds of Ability, have been the circumstances which have enabled Ability to produce most itself.