Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 25.djvu/31

Rh with the special history of the society. That it happens for the moment to be attracting a considerable amount of popular attention in connection with sensational politics and sociology, with agitations for land nationalization and collectivism among pretended representatives of the working-classes, is an additional reason for our not neglecting this question; but it is a question to which the society has a primary claim, and which the authors of the agitations I have referred to would have done well to study from the statistical point of view.

There are two or three ways in which statistics may throw light on such a question as I have put forward. The first and most direct is to see what records there are of the money earnings of the masses now and fifty years ago, ascertain whether they have increased or diminished, and then compare them with the rise or fall in the prices of the chief articles which the masses consume. Even such records would not give a complete answer. It is conceivable, for instance, that, while earning more money, and being able to spend it to more advantage, the working-classes might be no better off than formerly. There may be masses, as there are individuals, who do not know how to spend. The question of means, however, will carry us some distance on the road to our object. We shall know that the masses must be better off, unless they have deteriorated in the art of spending, a subject of separate inquiry.

In investigating such records, however, we have to recognize that the ideal mode of answering the question is not yet possible. That mode would be to draw up an account of the aggregate annual earnings of the working-classes for a period about fifty years ago, and a similar account of the aggregate annual earnings of the same classes at the present time, and then compare the average per head and per family at the different dates. Having thus ascertained the increase or diminution in the amount per head at the different dates, it would be comparatively easy, though not in itself quite so easy a matter as it seems, to ascertain how much less or how much more the increased or diminished sum would buy of the chief articles of the workman's consumption. But no such account that I know of has been drawn up, except for a date about fifteen or sixteen years ago, when Mr. Dudley Baxter and Professor Leone Levi both drew up statements of enormous value as to aggregate earnings, statements which it would now be most desirable to compare with similar statements for the present time, if we could have them, and which will be simply invaluable to future generations. In the absence of such statements, all that can be done is to compare what appear to be the average wages of large groups of the working-classes. If it is found that the changes in the money wages of such groups are in the same direction, or almost all in the same direction, then there would be sufficient reason for believing that similar changes had occurred throughout the entire mass. It