Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 25.djvu/35

Rh gets from 50 to 100 per cent more money for 20 per cent less work; in round figures, he has gained from 70 to 120 per cent in fifty years in money return. It is just possible of course that the workman may do as much or nearly as much in the shorter period as he did in his longer hours. Still, there is the positive gain in his being less time at his task, which many of the classes still tugging lengthily day by day at the oar would appreciate. The workman may have been wise or unwise in setting much store by shorter hours in bettering himself, but the shortening of the hours of labor is undoubtedly to be counted to the good as well as the larger money return he obtains.

We come then to the question of what the changes have been in the prices of the chief articles of the workman's consumption. It is important, to begin with, that, as regards prices of commodities generally, there seems to be little doubt things are much the same as they were forty or fifty years ago. This is the general effect of the inquiries which have been made first as to the depreciation of gold consequent on the Australian and Californian gold discoveries, and next as to the appreciation of gold which has taken place within the last twenty years consequent on the new demands for gold which have arisen, and the falling off in the supply as compared with the period between 1850 and 1860. It would burden us too much to go into these inquiries on an occasion like the present, and therefore I only take the broad result. This is that, while there was a moderate rise of prices all round between the years 1847-'50, just before the new gold came on the market, and the year 1862, when Mr. Jevons published his celebrated essay, a rise not exceeding about 20 per cent, yet within the last twenty years this rise has disappeared, and prices are back to the level, or nearly to the level, of 1847-'50. The conclusion is that, taking things in the mass, the sovereign goes as far as it did forty or fifty years ago, while there are many new things in existence at a low price which could not then have been bought at all. If in the interval the average money earnings of the working-classes have risen between 50 and 100 per cent, there must have been an enormous change for the better in the means of the working-man, unless by some wonderful accident it has happened that his special articles have changed in a different way from the general run of prices.

But looking to special articles, we find that on balance prices are lower and not higher. Take wheat. It is notorious that wheat, the staff of life, has been lower on the average of late years than it was before the free-trade era. Even our fair-trade friends, who find it so difficult to see very plain things, were forced to allow, in that wonderful manifesto which was published in the "Times" some weeks back, that wheat is about 5s. a quarter cheaper on the average than it was. The facts, however, deserve still more careful statement to enable us to realize the state of things fifty years ago and at the present time.