for the
time. Wherever I was, whether in London or country houses--for in these
respects my habits remained much what they had been--I had with me the
works of economists, statistical reports, multitudes of current
speeches, all bearing on industrial and social questions. At intervals I
dealt with one or another of these in tentative articles contributed to
reviews like the _Nineteenth Century_, till at length I redigested,
rewrote and combined them, thus, after some three years of effort,
producing a succinct book called _Labor and the Popular Welfare_.

This book, in carefully simplified language, dealt comprehensively with
the fundamental causes to which the increased wealth of the modern world
is due, and on which the maintenance, to say nothing of the enlargement,
of this modern increment depends. The argument of the book, in its
general outline, is as follows. Without manual labor there can be no
wealth at all. Unless most of its members are laborers, no community can
exist. But so long as wealth is produced by manual labor only the
amount produced is small. In whatever way it may be distributed, the
majority will be primitively poor. The only means by which the total
product of a given population can be increased is not any new toil on
the part of the laboring many, but an intellectual direction of the many
by a super-capable few. Here is the true cause of all modern increments
of wealth. Let these increments be produced, and it is possible for the
many to share in them. It is on securing a share of them that their only
hope of an ampler life depends, but it is from the efforts of the few
that any increase of their shares must come. The fundamental facts of
the case are, indeed, of a character the precise reverse of that which
the theories of the Socialists impute to them. In proportion as the
wages of labor rise above a given minimum the many are the pensioners of
the few, the few are not the plunderers of the many, and those who
maintain the opposite are mere intellectual gamins standing on their
heads in a gutter.

This thesis I had outlined already in my earlier work, _Social
Equality_, but in _Labor and the Popular Welfare_ it is urged with more
precision, and the general argument is, as in the earlier work it was
not, supported by a skeleton of more or less precise statistics. This
book, by the advice of a friend, was offered to a celebrated publisher,
a pillar of sound Conservatism; but in effect, if not