Page:Karl Kautsky - The Social Revolution - tr. Wood Simons (1902.djvu/47

 part, at least, to politicians, for in the larger cities municipalization has brought many improvements. With the gas workers also considerations of competition and exploitation by private capital are of least importance. In part, also, the upward leap of 1891 as well as the sudden appearance of the "new Unionism" which gave rise to such far-reaching hopes has now run into the ground. More even than with the gas workers the rise of wages in 1891 for the sailors and miners appears wholly abnormal and temporary. With the miners the wages of 1886 were the same as those of 1860, but by 1891 they were 50 per cent higher. One cannot consider this as a secure advance. With the wood workers, the woolen workers and the laborers in the iron industry, the increase of wages since 1860 is far less. Bowley would also have us believe that the wages of the unorganized laborers of England had risen 40 per cent during the same time in which the well organized iron workers had only increased 25 per cent.

But let us take the table as it is. What does it really prove? Even by this extraordinarily optimistic presentation wages are becoming an ever smaller portion of the social income. From 1860 to 1874 the average rate of increase was 45 per cent; from 1877 to 1891 only 42⅔ per cent. If we place in opposition to this, in lack of more reliable figures, the total of the income tax that did not arise from wages but from