MANUAL LABOUR AND ITS EARNINGS.
Let us look a little closer at Sir Robert Giffen's figures. Though 24s. 7d. a week is the average wage per man, 24 per cent. of the labouring class have earnings below £1 a week. But for a man with a family to have less than £1 a week means that he is hardly within the region of civilisation. The Bishop who said that it was im- possible to be a Christian on less than £1 a week, spoke, we fear, what was something very like the truth. Of course, there are exceptional cases ; but as a rule, less than £1 a week will not give men the chance to hire house-room and provide food and clothes for themselves and their families of the kind which conforms to a civilised standard, much less to purchase an occasional period of holiday leisure, to provide moderate recreation, to insure against sickness, and to obtain some reasonable facilities for self-improvement and cultivation. In a family in a town which is being brought up on less than £1 a week, there is not enough to spare for a halfpenny daily paper, for a treat to the children and the " missis," or for any sort of amusement, unless the amount spent on house-hire is cut down to a point which makes the home unbearably squalid. Given the prices and habits of life that prevail in the United Kingdom, it is impossible to feel satisfied as long as there is any large percentage of the town population living below the .21-a-week level. The actual number of men computed by Sir Robert Giffen to be earning under £1 a week is not given in the Blue-book ; but we presume that, taking the United Kingdom as a whole, there cannot be less than two million men in this position, and that most of these men are married, and have to sup- port not merely themselves, but a wife and family. Here, then, is the social problem at close quarters. What the country wants is to see this great section of the community passed up from the class which is below what we will call the civilisation level into that which is within it. No nation can consider itself in a satisfactory state when anything approaching two million families are living the lives which we know are led by the town labourers with 15s. or 17s. a week, and the country labourers with 10s. or 12s. It wants very little experience or gift of observation to realise that the expenditure of these sums cannot enable a family to exist under conditions favourable to a worthy standard of moral, of religious, or of intellectual development. You cannot expect the older men and women to improve under such conditions ; and what is worse, you cannot expect people to bring up sons and daughters that shall be an addition to the com- munity which is worth having. There are, of course, plenty of exceptions, but as a general rule the boys and girls brought up in the homes of the really poor—and people below the £1-a-week level in towns and the 17s. level in the country are really poor—are deprived by their bringing-up of the chance of improving their condition mentally or physically. We have taken the £1-a-week level in order not to exaggerate our case. If, however, we were to take the 258.-a-week level, and, considering the rents for houses in the towns, 25s. a week is not a high wage, the size of the class whose income must be pronounced as unsatisfactory would be enormously increased. The men with wages between 20s. and 25s. a week are 33 per cent. of the labouring class. But since the men under 20s. a week were 24 per cent., we see that the men under 25s. per week amount to 57 per cent., or considerably more than half the population engaged in manual labour. Pro- bably the best way to summarise the facts is this. Half the population engaged in manual labour earn enough to secure reasonable comfort. Of the other half, some are in a position which may be regarded as satisfactory ; but the position of the greater part of this second half is one which cannot be regarded as capable of securing a really civilised standard of living.
How are we to obtain a change for the better,—how, that is, are we to get this large body of our people within the line of true civilisation ? That is the problem. In our opinion, at any rate, the Socialistic remedy of nationalising the sources of wealth is ridiculous. It would take away even that civilisation which we have. We are old- fashioned enough to think that the way to improve the material condition of the people is to do one or both of two things, which are, however, in reality, the same,— to increase the wages of the labourer, or to lower the prices of the things on which he spends his wages. Only in one or both of these ways will you make him a richer man, and this, and nothing else, is what you want to do. Raising wages is, of course, the main hope of the labourer. How will this be accomplished ? By the accumulation of capital. Practically, capital can only be made use of by hiring labour in some form or other. Then the more capital there is to compete for labour, the higher will be the remuneration of labour. If, then, accumulation goes on, and is not checked by war, the price of labour must rise. This process, too, will be helped by the discovery of the economic principle that in many cases, and under many conditions, efficiency of labour varies directly with its remuneration. Within rea- sonable limits high wages mean cheap labour, and this on the very same grounds that farmers find it economical not to starve their cart-horses. At the same time the in- vention of new processes, the improvements in machinery, and the use of scientific knowledge are increasing the amount of the world's industrial product, increasing, that is, the labourer's wage by increasing its purchasing-power. Only in one instance does this process seem to be arrested. House-rent goes up, though corn and sugar and tobacco and clothes are falling. Yet even here there is hope. At first sight it looks as if the competition for building-sites in towns must keep up the price of houses. The men must live in the town in order to get the high wages, and more men want houses than there are buildings. Therefore, the preference is given to those who offer high rents. The gradual cheapening of transport is, however, altering all this. A man may now live three miles from the factory and yet get there in good time each morning. His bicycle has reduced his rent almost to the country level. Cheap trains from the country into the towns have a similar effect, and a very little cheapening of steam locomotion might entirely counteract the effects of the present pressure on the soil in the matter of high rents. In the country, again, the use of cheaper building materials for cottages might very materially increase the labourer's comfort.
Fortunately, these two phenomena—the raising of wages and the lowering of prices by the increase in the industrial product—are going on at the present moment, and are surely, if slowly, improving the condition of the labourer and passing men from the class below the civilisa- tion line into that above it. Nothing, then, must be done to check the process. But this means that nothing must be done to prevent the accumulation of capital or the im- provement of industrial production. The solution of the social problem and the raising of the labourer into a better position depends upon not injuring the capitalist or pre- venting him using his wealth in the adoption of new pro- cesses. Wound the capitalist and treat him as he was treated in the Middle Ages, and you will soon have a return to the mediaeval state of civilisation among the labourers. Give capital fair play and encourage its de- velopment, and you do a great deal to solve the social problem. This is of course a doctrine which is just now entirely out of fashion, but it is none the less true and sound.
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