growing
still more rapidly. While incomes of L100 to L300 have grown by a little
more than 50 per cent., those from L300 to L1000 have nearly doubled,
those between L1000 and L5000 have more than doubled, and incomes over
L5000 have more than trebled.

But though such comparisons justify the conclusion that the upper grades
of skilled labour have made considerable advances, and that the lower
grades of regular unskilled labourers have to a less degree shared in
this advance, they do not warrant the optimist conclusion often drawn
from them, that poverty is a disease which left alone will cure itself,
and which, in point of fact, is curing itself rapidly. Before we consent
to accept the evidence of improvement in the average condition of the
labouring classes during the last half century as sufficient evidence to
justify this opinion we ought to pay regard to the following
considerations--

1. It should be remembered that a comparison between England of the
present day with England in the decade 1830-1840 is eminently favourable
to a theory of progress. The period from 1790 to 1840 was the most
miserable epoch in the history of the English working-classes. Much of
the gain must be rightly regarded rather as a recovery from sickness,
than as a growth in normal health. If the decade 1730-1740, for example,
were to be taken instead, the progress of the wage-earner, especially in
southern England, would be by no means so obvious. The southern
agricultural labourer and the whole body of low-skilled workers were
probably in most respects as well off a century and a half ago as they
are to-day.

2. The great fall of prices, due to cheapening of production and of
transport during the last twenty years, benefits the poor far less than
the rich. For, while the prices of most comforts and luxuries have
fallen very greatly, the same is not true of most necessaries. The gain
to the workers is chiefly confined to food prices, which have fallen
some 40 per cent since 1880. Taking the retail prices of foods consumed
by London working-class families we find that since 1880 the price of
flour has fallen about 60 per cent., bread falling a little more than
half that amount; the prices of beef and mutton have fallen nearly to
the same extent as flour, though bacon stands in 1903 just about where
it stood in 1880. Sugar exhibits a deep drop until 1898, rising
afterwards in consequence of the war tax and the Sugar Convention; tea
shows a