written the number of families whose incomes were more than half that amount was not more than eight thousand. It is evident, therefore, that according to the most liberal computation, five rotting members being credited to each family, the number of individuals rotting with plethora and excess, instead of being four millions, cannot be possibly more than one-hundredth part of it. But let us make to Mr. Whiteing one concession more-a concession whose liberality he would certainly himself reject. Let us concede that, to enable a family to rot with plethora and excess, an income of 1,000l., instead of 10,000l., is sufficient. The number of families enjoying 1,000l. a year and upwards in the United Kingdom does not exceed eighty thousand; and these, if again we multiply the figures by five, will give us a total of four hundred thousand persons, which is only a tenth part of the richer tenth of the population, and of the population as a whole is not a tenth, but a hundredth. Mr. Whiteing, therefore, in his estimate, if we take the most favourable view of it, is about as near to any possible reality as he would be if he said that the height of St. Paul's Cathedral was nearly five thousand feet, or that the average life of a man was seven hundred years. Nor is his estimate of the condition of the poorer classes any truer than his estimate of the richer. Nine-tenths of the population, he says, are still living like brutes, or, in other words, about thirty-six million persons. Now, just as he exemplifies his idea of a man rotting with plethora by the life of the young gentleman who sleeps between silk sheets, so does he exemplify his idea of the man who lives like a brute by the lives of the persons who inhabit Number 5 John Street. Now these are persons, according to Mr. Whiteing's account, who earn from 10s. to 18s. a week, and if his statement about nine-tenths of the population means anything at all, it means that the life of these is a fair type of the lives of the whole thirty-six millions who are not dying of plethora. How far is this the case? How far do the classes who live in streets like John Street represent the classes as a whole of which the vast total is composed? This is a question which can be answered with some accuracy. In the first place, the thirty-six millions include something like a million persons belonging to families with incomes approaching 2001. It includes approximately six million. persons belonging to families with incomes approaching 150l. Of the male population of workers over fifteen years of age, it includes two millions who earn from 80l. to

100l. a year, representing, together with their families, about nine million individuals. It includes three millions who earn about 70l. a year, representing, together with their families, more than thirteen million individuals-and these incomes, it should be remembered, are, in two cases out of five, largely augmented by the earnings of wives and daughters; while of the various grades of workers represented by the inhabitants of John Street, the more prosperous represent less than a sixth of the working population as a whole, and the poorest represent less than a twenty-fifth of it.

6

Mr. Whiteing's statistical abstract, therefore, of the social conditions of this country is so absolutely false to facts that it can hardly be said to stand in any thinkable relation to them. His descriptions of deplorable poverty apply accurately and, as we have said before, they are exceptionally good of their kind-to a certain portion of our population. Of this there can be no doubt. But this portion of the population, instead of being nine-tenths of the whole, more nearly approaches one-tenth; while his ludicrous rich men, who are rotting with the infirmities of plethora,' could not possibly, if we assume them to be a class at all, amount to as much as a thousandth part of it. In order to bring his ideas and statements into some accordance with reality, without discarding his own phraseology altogether, instead of saying that nine-tenths of the population live the lives of brutes to enable one-tenth to live lives of fabulous luxury, he would have to say that while nine-tenths of the popula tion enjoyed progressive prosperity, one exceptional tenth, for some important reason, are excluded from it.

If Mr. Whiteing is thus astray in his diagnosis of social suffering, it can hardly be expected that he will teach us the way to cure it. A social reformer can no more prescribe for society if, because he feels strongly the horror of its exceptional miseries, he reasons as though these exceptional miseries were the rule, than a doctor can prescribe for a patient who has a crushed foot if, because the foot gives the patient intense pain, the doctor concludes, and bases his treatment on the conclusion, that every organ in the man's body is injured or deranged also. There is no question here of the intensity of the evils referred to. Let us grant that this is even greater than Mr. Whiteing represents it. Mr. Whiteing's error lies in his complete misconception of their extent, and, misconceiving their extent,

he entirely misconceives their origin. What is a local wound or injury he mistakes for an organic disease.

Let us now see how, as a consequence of this mistake, Mr. Whiteing proposes to remedy the suffering which, with so much true feeling, he deplores. Imagining that riches on the one hand, and extreme poverty on the other, result from the simple process of grabbing, with unequal luck, that hence the gain of one man is necessarily the loss of another, and that the grabbing process is due to one fatal desire, which animates all of us, be we successful or unsuccessful, to get for ourselves the largest share we can, the sole remedy, he says, is to eradicate this desire from our hearts. Let

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us cease,' he says, 'to be competitive. Let us cease to 'be self-helping.' Let the cleverest of us, at the table of life, act merely as carvers,' whose sole anxiety is to press the best bits on the stupidest. Ring out the old,' he exclaims, ring in the new-the great moral renaissance'the new learning of the mind and heart-the new type of 6 man and woman.' Now even here Mr. Whiteing exhibits a philosophic grasp of truth which renders him essentially superior to Socialists of the type of Marx. He sees that no fundamental change in the process of distribution can be permanently established unless we first accomplish a change, fundamental to the same degree and equally permanent, in the average human character. 'As a mere economie formula,' he says, 'Democracy must fade off into vision. The underground system of the human being is the thing we must first set right.' So far as it goes nothing can be more true than this. The only questions we have to ask with regard to it are the following:-First, whether any fundamental change in the process of distribution is necessary or would be efficient as a remedy for social degradation and misery; and secondly, whether, assuming this economic change to be desirable, the corresponding change which it implies in the average human character is producible. We shall find that the answer to both these questions is a negative.

With regard to the first, we have only to insist once more on a truth which we have expressed already, namely, that the real causes to which the inequalities of wealth are due, while they are to be sought, as Mr. Whiteing says they are, in the characteristics of human nature, are not to be sought in the characteristics of it which Mr. Whiteing imagines. They are not to be sought in the universality of a selfish desire to appropriate wealth; they are to be sought

in the great inequalities of men's powers of producing it. It may, perhaps, be argued that a man's desire to keep what he has produced himself is just as reprehensible as a desire to grab what he has not produced; but, as a force acting on society, it is, at all events, a different desire. It sets in motion a different series of processes. It sets in motion processes, not of abstraction from the total of wealth, but of addition to it. It is in itself, therefore, not the ultimate cause of poverty, and consequently the abolition of it would not be the abolition of poverty. On the contrary, the reverse is the case. It is a fact attested by the history of modern industrialism that the exceptional producers of wealth are never able to keep the whole of their produce. For various causes a part of each new increment which their talent and enterprise add to the national stock finds its way into the pockets of those who have not produced it. Of the additional efficiency which common labour derives from the aid which exceptional talent and enterprise lend to it, and which it would lose the moment they were not induced to exert themselves, common labour is constantly receiving a percentage which not only increases in its absolute amount, but also tends to increase relatively to the fund from which it is taken. This is the reason of that general rise of wages which has taken place during the past sixty years, and has extended itself to the whole population except one particular fraction of it. Putting this fraction aside, the desire of the individual to possess wealth-the desire. which is at the root of competition, and which Mr. Whiteing wishes to extinguish as the ultimate cause of poverty is the cause of the diffusion of a gradually increasing prosperity. Does Mr. Whiteing think that if ten thousand workmen were obliged to work for one particular employer, they would not be much more likely to be better housed, to receive larger wages, and to be better cared for in every possible way if the employer, by his enterprise, should make a constantly increasing income than they would be if from his apathy or incompetence his business remained stationary or dwindled? As for the unrelieved poverty of the non-progressive fraction which excites Mr. Whiteing's pity, and deserves the pity of all, we shall never be able to understand it, we shall never be able to alleviate it, till we learn to realise that it is the exception and not the rule. Let us realise this, and we shall realise that the true cause of this fraction's condition lies not outside itself but within itself; and that it is poor, not because others have seized on

exceptional wealth, but because to the process of producing it it contributes exceptionally little. If it is to be helped, as a whole, at all-if its condition is to be really raised, the object of the reformer must be, not, as Mr. Whiteing thinks, to make the rest of the community essentially different from what it is, but to make this fraction less different than it is from the rest of the community. If Mr. Whiteing wished to study the effectiveness of a university as a teaching body, he would not go from college to college picking out the idlers and the drunkards, or the men who from mere feebleness either of will or intellect are dunces. He would test the scholarship of the more brilliant, and especially of the ordinary students; and if he wished to redeem the dunces, he would never think of doing so by dissuading others from competing for the Hertford scholarship. Exceptional poverty, as a whole, has no more essential connexion with exceptional wealth, as a whole, than exceptional incompetence at a university has with exceptional talent. Even Mr. Whiteing himself sees this truth at moments, though he has totally failed to incorporate it into his doctrine of life. In one place he observes that even in a collection of savage huts one hut will be found more squalid and more ragged than the rest. Does he think that this one is squalid and ragged because the rest are clean and neat? When he is making the observation referred to he does not even suggest it. He does not suggest that, because nine of the huts are clean, the tenth hut is dirty; or that to improve the latter it is necessary to interfere with the former. In every civilisation there are elements of wrong; but taken as a whole, and certain parts being excepted, it is always, relatively to human possibilities, right. In other words, there is always-just as there is always in the most diseased human body-less to be altered than there is to be nourished and maintained. Mr. Whiteing argues as though, because the body politic has crushed one of its feet, the way to cure its foot was to cut out its lungs. His failure as a social philosopher arises out of two errors. In the first place, he takes a tenth of the population as a type of nearly the whole. In the second place, with regard to the redemption of this submerged tenth, he fails to see that the true business of the reformer is not to teach the majority to become unlike themselves, but to help the minority to become less unlike the majority.

And now, having shown that Mr. Whiteing's proposed revolution in the whole 'underground system of the human

VOL. CXCI. NO. CCCXCII.

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