Page:The Economic Journal Volume 1.djvu/389

 DIFFICULTIES OF INDIVIDUALISM 367 employ the worker, this is only done on condition that two im- portant deductions, rent and interest, can be made from his product, for the benefit of two, in this capacity, absolutely un- productive classes--those exercising the bare ownership of land and capital. The reward of labour being thus reduced, on an average, by about one-third, the remaining eightpence out of the shilling is then shared between the various classes who have co-operated in the production--including the inventor, the managing employer, and the mere wage-worker but shared in the competitive struggle in such a way that at least fourpence goes to a favoured set of educated workers, numbering less than one-fifth of the whole, leaving four-fifths to divide less than fourpence out of the shilling between them. The consequence is the social condition we see around us. A fortunate few, owing to their legal power over the instruments of wealth-production, are able to command the services of thousands of industrial slaves whose faces they have never seen, without rendering any service to them or to society in exchange. A larger body of persons contribute some labour, but are able, from their cultivated ability or special education, to choose occupations for which the competition wage is still high, owing to the small number of possible competitors. These two classes together number only one-fifth of the whole. On the other hand is the great mass of the people, the weekly wage- earners, four out of five of the whole population, toiling perpetually for less than a third of the aggregate product of labour, at an annual wage averaging at most 40 per adult, hurried into un- necessarily early graves by the severity of their lives, and dying, as regards at least one-third of them, destitute or actually in receipt of poor-law relieb ' To me at least,' says Mr. Frederic Harrison, no mean authority,  'it would be enough to condemn modern society as hardly an advance on slavery or serfdom, if the permanent condition of industry were to be that which we now behold, that 90 per cent. of the actual producers of wealth have no home that they can call their own beyond the end of a week; have no bit of soil or so much as a room that belongs to them; have nothing of value of any kind except as much old furniture as will go in a cart; have the precarious chance of weekly wages which barely suffice to keep them in health; are housed for the most part in places that no man thinks fit for his horse; are separated by so narrow a margin of destitution that a month of bad trade, sickness, or unexpected loss, brings them face to face with hunger and pauperism ..... This is the normal state of the average workmen in town or country.'  Report of Industrial Remuneration Conference, 1886, p. i29.