tion of Great Britain appears to be increasing at a rate too rapid to be kept up with by the progress of improvement in production, using this term in so large a sense as to include every moral and material agency which has a tendency to supply new motives or afford new means of production.*

It was long since pointed out by Mr. Mill that, whenever population makes a more rapid increase than improvement in production, there is a diminishing return to industry. This diminished return falls on the laborer and not on the capitalist. The increase of population increases the competition among the laborers, and the capitalist secures the advantage of this competition in the stationary or lowered rate of wages. The accumulation of his capital is not necessarily used in giving employment to additional laborers; but it may be, and in the present condition of English industry and social customs often is, invested in such a manner as to afford no advantage to the laboring class. Thus the capital from which the wages-fund is derived augments, but there is little or no increase in the rate of wages.

During the last thirty years the capital invested in agriculture has greatly increased, and farming processes, as is well known, have improved, requiring, in some cases, more skilled labor than was formerly employed. Within this period there has been a nominal rise in the average wages of agricultural laborers,, to the amount, perhaps, of a shilling or eighteen pence a week, or of from ten to fifteen per cent. †

But,

* "In round numbers, about 240,000 persons are annually added to the resident population in Great Britain. The additional wheat supply required for that number, at an average of six bushels per head, amounts to nearly 180,000 quarters, which, at an average English yield of twenty-eight bushels per acre, represents the produce of upwards of 50,000 acres, and of a much larger average at a lower rate of production." Mr. Fonblanque's Report, accompanying the Agricultural Returns of Great Britain for 1868, p. 9.

† Mr. Purdy, in an elaborate paper in the Statistical Journal, September, 1861, estimated the average weekly wages of men employed in agricultural labor in thirty-four counties, in 1837, at 10s. 4d., and in 1860, at 11s. 7d. Since 1860 there has been a further advance, and the average wages, between a maximum of 18s. in the northern counties, and a minimum of 9s. in the southern, may be reckoned at between 12s. and 13s. See statements concerning wages in the First Report of the Commissioners on the Employment of Children, Young Persons, and Women in Agriculture, 1867. Part I.

Mr. Bailey Denton, in the letter already cited, says: "I find that at present the

although this is apparently a considerable rise, it is to be remembered that during this period the value of money has declined, so that its purchasing power is less than of old, and though there has been a fall in the price of some articles required by the laborer, there has been a rise in others. Bread is but very little cheaper; meat and milk are dearer; clothing and fuel have slightly declined in price. Meanwhile there has been an advance in the standard of living among the upper classes, altogether disproportionate to the advance in the laborer's wages, thus widening the gulf between employer and employed.

But whether the wages of the laborer have positively risen or not, and whether his present condition be better or worse than it was twenty or thirty years ago, the fact remains that the condition of the laboring classes taken generally—that is,

average weekly wages of the ordinary farm laborer vary from 10s. 6d. in the midsouthern and southwestern districts, including Cornwall, Devon, Somerset, and Dorset, which are the worst paid counties, to 14s. 6d. in the northeastern district of England, which includes Northumberland, Durham, and Yorkshire, the best paid counties. These figures do not include the higher grade of laborers, such as bailiffs, managers, engineers, and other special workmen, but they cover the wages of shepherds, horsekeepers, and herdsmen, as well as all descriptions of field men required on the farm, and who receive a weekly or daily pay. The mean weekly money wages of able-bodied men, not employed at piecework, throughout the whole of England, closely approximates 12s. 6d."

The following extract from a letter in the Pall Mall Gazette of January 22, 1869, indicates that the minimum wages of the hind is in some districts lower than supposed by Mr. Denton: "The clergy of many counties could tell of the constant struggles of their poor parishioners to keep body and soul together. Take the case of Herefordshire, for example, and especially the western side of the county. There the farm laborer's ordinary wages are 9s. a week; his ordinary home is two small rooms, through the thatched roof of which the rain drops on to a floor half mud and half broken stones; his daily food, dry bread and rough cider; his normal condition one of ignorance and squalor. Much of this may doubtless be attributed to general causes, which operate more or less strongly in all purely agricultural districts. But in Herefordshire much is also due to its system of farmletting, and the extent to which game-preserving is carried."

* The following sentence is from an article entitled "Remarks on the Physique of the Rural Population," by the distinguished historian, the Rev. Charles Merivale, in the Contemporary Review for February, 1869: "The ordinary wages of the laborer are still regulated precisely by the price of corn; and, as it seems to me, have not risen either positively or relatively." And again: "I cannot say that during the twenty years over which "my observation extends there has been any sensible improvement in the food of the poor agricultural laborer in my district." Evidence similar in its character abounds.

the condition of a majority of the population of England—is to the last degree deplorable. The wages are insufficient to support the laborers as a class and their families in health and comfort, to promote the formation of habits upon which moral progress depends, to encourage independence, or to afford them a ground of hope for the improvement of their condition, without demanding of them efforts far beyond the average capacity of human nature.

It is difficult for those who have never known the pangs, the weariness, the moral enervation, and the intellectual dulness, consequent upon the pressure of continued want, to enter in imagination into the real life of the poor. But if it be difficult for those who are rich or well off, the cultivated and intelligent, so to realize the wretchedness of those upon whose ill-requited daily toil the very prosperity of the upper classes depends, as not merely to feel their responsibility and their duty toward the poor, but to recognize the dangers to themselves and to the state which the present condition of society implies, how much more difficult is it for the poor themselves to feel the force of those moral considerations which are constantly urged, and too often urged in a spirit of mere selfishness, by regard to which they might achieve some improvement of their condition? With what face can we urge economy and thrift upon a man bringing up a family on from ten to twenty shillings a week? How can it be hoped to check population by preaching continence to those whose habitations render the preservation of modest habits an impossibility? How can it be hoped to stay intemperance, when the cheap indulgence which stimulates the vacant mind or deadens the dull sense of weariness is the solitary outlet from the habitual cheerlessness of forlorn days? A low physical condition induces a low moral condition, and restraints which avail with those who are well off have no power over the very poor.

When one writes or speaks in this way in England, and points out the progressive danger to society arising from the condition of the mass of the population being such that neither physical nor moral health can exist among it, he is frequently met with the assertions that there is a great deal of exaggeration concerning the wretchedness of the poor, and that measures for

their improvement are now in progress, which will be sufficient before very long to bring about a remedy for confessed evils.

Against the charge of exaggeration, testimony may be adduced which is not likely to be questioned. Fifteen years ago the eminent surgeon, Mr. John Simon, now the Medical Officer of the Privy Council, and at that time the Officer of Health to the city, wrote as follows in the preface to a volume in which were republished his reports relating to the sanitary condition. of London.* Mr. Simon's character, wide experience, and long, useful services in the cause of sanitary improvement, give the highest authority and weight to his words.

"This national prevalence of sanitary neglect is a very grievous fact; and although I pretend to no official concern in anything beyond the city boundaries, I cannot forego the present opportunity of saying a few words to bespeak for it the reader's attention. I would beg any educated person to consider what are the conditions in which alone animal life can thrive; to learn, by personal inspection, how far these conditions are realized for the masses of our population, and to form for himself a conscientious judgment as to the need for great, if even almost revolutionary, reforms. Let any such person devote an hour to visiting some very poor neighborhood in the metropolis, or in almost any of our large towns. Let him breathe its air, taste its water, eat its bread. Let him think of human life struggling there for years. Let him fancy what it would be to himself to live there, in that beastly degradation of stink, fed with such bread, drinking such water. Let him enter some house there at hazard, and, heeding where he treads, follow the guidance of his outraged nose to the yard (if there be one), or the cellar. Let him talk to the inmates; let him hear what is thought of the bone-boiler next door, or the slaughter-house behind; what of the sewer-grating before the door, what of the Irish basketmakers upstairs, twelve in a room, who came in after the hopping and got fever; what of the artisan's dead body, stretched on his widow's one bed, beside her living children.

"Let him, if he have a heart for the duties of manhood and patriotism, gravely reflect whether such sickening evils as an hour's inquiry will have shown him ought to be the habit of our laboring population; whether the legislature, which his voice helps to constitute, is doing all that might be done to palliate these wrongs; whether it be not a jarring discord in the civilization we boast, a worse than pagan savage

Sanitary Condition of the City of London, 1848-1853. London: John W. Parker & Son. 1854. 8vo. pp. xl., 312.

ness in the Christianity we profess, that such things continue in the midst of us scandalously neglected, and that the interests of human life, except against wilful violence, are almost uncared for by the law.

"And let not the inquirer too easily admit what will be urged by less earnest persons as their pretext for inaction, that such evils are inalienable from poverty. Let him, in visiting those homes of our laboring population, inquire into the actual rent paid for them, dogholes as they are; and, studying the financial experience of model dormitories and model lodgings, let him reckon what that rent can purchase. He will soon have misgivings as to dirt being cheap in the market, and cleanliness unattainably expensive.

"Yet what if it be so? Shift the title of the grievance, is the fact less insufferable? If there be citizens so destitute that they can afford to live only where they must straightway die, renting the twentieth straw heap in some lightless fever-bin, or squatting amid rotten soakage, or breathing from the cesspool and the sewer; so destitute that they can buy no water, that milk and bread must be impoverished to meet their means of purchase, that the drugs sold them for sickness must be rubbish or poison; surely no civilized community dare avert itself from the care of this abject orphanage. And, ruat cœlum, let the principle be followed whithersoever it may lead, that Christian society leaves none of its children helpless. If such and such conditions of food or dwelling are absolutely inconsistent with healthy life, what more final test of pauperism can there be, or what clearer right to public succor, than that the subject's pecuniary means fall short of providing him other conditions than those? It may be that competition has screwed down the rate of wages below what will purchase indispensable food and wholesome lodgement. Of this, as fact, I am no judge; but to its meaning, if fact, I can speak. All labor below that mark is masked pauperism. Whatever the employer saves is gained at the public expense. When, under such circumstances, the laborer or his wife or child spends an occasional month or two in the hospital, that some fever infection may work itself out, or that the impending loss of an eye or a limb may be averted by animal food ;* or when he gets various aid from the Board of Guardians, in all sorts of preventable illness, and eventually for the expenses of interment; it is the public that, too late for the man's health or independence, pays the arrears of wage which should have hindered this suffering and sorrow.

*Twenty years' daily experience of hospital surgery enables me to say, from personal knowledge, that our wards and out-patient rooms are never free from painful illustrations of the effects of insufficient nutrition; cases, in fact, of chronicstarvation disease among the poor; such disease as Magendie imitated in his celebrated experiments, by feeding animals on an exclusively non-azotized diet.