it carries with it great contingent advantages, because he
knows perfectly well that 700 pounds a year in London is worth a good
deal more than 1000 pounds a year in New York. But the same kind of
prudent calculation is seldom applied to the case of town versus
country living at home. It is impossible to persuade the labourer that
a pound a week in London is really less than fifteen shillings a week
in the country. Men are dazzled by mere figures, and there is no
country clerk who would not jump at the idea of a fifty pounds a year
rise in London, though ten minutes spent over a sum in addition and
subtraction would be sufficient to assure him that he would not be
enlarging his income but diminishing it. A man has to live upon a
certain scale suited to his needs and tastes, but the income which
makes this kind of life possible is a variable quantity. It is not by
what men earn in the aggregate that their incomes should be measured,
but by what they have left when the necessary cost of living is
defrayed. If it costs a man fifty pounds a year more to live in London
than in the country, he is obviously no better off by the extra fifty
pounds he earns in London. He is not earning fifty pounds for himself
but fifty pounds for the landlord, the rate-collector, the gas-man, the
restaurant proprietor, the omnibus and railway companies. His gold
never reaches his own pocket; it is filched from him by dexterous
thieves; it gleams before him for an instant like the coin spun in the
air by the conjurer or thimble-rigger, and then vanishes for ever. Yet
I have found few men keen enough to penetrate the delusion; it would
seem they love to be deluded, and by their conduct justify the satiric
lines of _Hudibras_--

Doubtless the pleasure is as great
To cheated be as 'tis to cheat.

In most things I claim to be no wiser than my fellow-men, but in this I
knew myself wiser; I knew where I was cheated. I knew that the
schoolmaster who cost me thirty pounds a year was a licensed footpad;
half the money spent in restaurants and tea-shops was blackmail paid to
respectability; the landlord who took his forty-five pounds a year from
my pocket was a mere robber, who took advantage of the need I had to
live in a certain locality that I might attend to my vocation. Not
only were my brains exploited that my employer might maintain a
sumptuous house at Kensington, but the wage he paid me was exploited by
a host of other people, wh