Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 36.djvu/670

652 on the surface that there is a real point for discussion. Under the essential conditions of modern life, principally the concentration of huge masses on narrow room, competition among laborers undoubtedly produces monopoly rent, the payment of which is a simple deduction from the gross money wages which workmen receive. If workmen, to avoid paying more than they can help, live at a distance from their work, they only escape the evil partially, because charges for conveyance to and from their work have to be paid. Clearly workmen under such conditions, as compared with conditions under which no monopoly rent or its equivalent has to be paid, are at a disadvantage. To show their real position for the purpose of comparison, the monopoly portion of the rent must be deducted. It is quite obvious, also, on the merest superficial aspect of the question, that as regards many workmen, at least, the disadvantage may easily be so serious as to compensate, and more than compensate, all the difference between the money wage of the country, where there is no monopoly rent, and the money wage of the town. Take the case of a west Highland peasant fifty years ago, living on a scanty wage of a few shillings a week, or the produce of a poor croft eked out by kelp-gathering or fishing, and his descendant at the present time in the slums of a great city, earning perhaps fifteen shillings a week, but disbursing four or five shillings for rent. The improvement in money earnings may be immense, perhaps one hundred per cent, and as regards prices of commodities there may be no drawback in the change, but the rent takes a monstrous cantle out of the margin. Comparing all the conditions, it may certainly be doubted whether the peasant, in the case supposed, in exchanging the hard life of the country, which still had the advantage of being in the open, for the hard life of the city, has made any real advance. Take a case higher in the scale. A doctor, to earn a living, resides in a city rather than in the country, pays a huge monopoly rent to begin with, and incurs many other analogous expenses, so that altogether he has a large leeway to make up before he can reckon that net income which can properly enter into comparison with that of his country colleague. The difference may easily be so great, I believe, that in many cases a professional man in a small country town with three or four hundred pounds a year may have a larger net income for the real objects of life, dealing with the question in a wise, philosophic spirit, than a professional man in London with a thousand or twelve hundred pounds a year. There are differences even between London and smaller provincial cities. Thus the question between gross and net, which workingmen have raised in these discussions, apropos of monopoly rent or the equivalent, is a real question. It is a new form of the old theorem that people may buy gold too dear.