For EIGHT DOLLARS, remitted directly to the Publishers, the LIVING AGE will be punctually forwarded for a year, free of postage. Remittances should be made by bank draft or check, or by post-office money-order, if possible. If neither of these can be procured, the money should be sent in a registered letter. All postmasters are obliged to register letters when requested to do so. Drafts, checks, and money-orders should be made payable to the order of LITTELL & Co. Single Numbers of THE LIVING AGE, 18 cents. A SONG OF SPRING. GOD's love has broken winter's chain, The earth is Paradise again. A smile of sun, a kiss of showers Stars nature's firmament with flowers: After this waiting, what relief To scent the spring! the robin thief Chirps champion on the holly bough, Let's sing! the winter's over now, And lovers lead beloved ones home. The snowdrop's come! Have you forgotten? Love, last year That day you pulled the branches down Have you not felt as yet? You will, The May we've sworn to love, whose birth Let's turn the year's sad leaf: forget English Illustrated Magazine. MAY AT ST. MORITZ. WHERE marble forms of ice and snow Lay chiselled, now the waters flow, And breath and life so warm and sweet Are round the ancient mountains' feet. The crocus o'er the fields will roam, Until the golden age has come Of glist'ning kingcups shining far From the green earth, as many a star From blue-black sky shall shine to-night And quench the flowers' softer light. Far up the hills the browsing goats Ring tiny bells with treble notes, And climb and play, from rocks they leap And climb again where narrow, steep, What joy And rough the path leads on. As goaded on by hope and fear, B. L. TOLLEMACHE. From The Contemporary Review. THE DISLOCATIONS OF INDUSTRY. MR. GIFFEN, in one of his admirable contributions to the science of statistics, has calculated that wealth in Great Britain increases at the rate of 3 per cent. per annum, while population increases only by 13 per cent. We should naturally draw the conclusion that, under such circumstances, the country will soon forget what poverty was. When we test this conclusion, however, by every-day experience, we find, as a matter requiring little statistical proof, that we have, every now and then, what are called depressions of trade; that the masses are as far as ever from being assured of steady work and wages; and that at the present time there are more unemployed on the streets of our great cities than ever. It in now over forty years since Carlyle wrote his "Past and Present." The work of genius, indeed, is not of an age, but for all time; but surely it is not because of the genius of Carlyle, but because of some strange mismanagement on our part, that the condition of England described in his first chapter is substantially the condition of England to-day. "We have more riches than any nation ever had before. In the midst of plethoric plenty the people perish." that, in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, famine-actual want of food swept away the population that tended to outrun its means of life. We know that, in those times, though the population was scanty, the return of land to labor was scanty also. England was in great part a land of tangled wood, and marsh, and moor; with few roads, and bad; with an agriculture little more advanced than that of the Indian ryot of to-day. But in our England, full to repletion with wealth of every sort, with ships bringing grain from every land till it is carried as ballast for very abundance, that there should be want, actual starvation, in poor men's homes, and that no man can very well say why, this is a strange thing. According to Mr. Atkinson's calculations, ten men on a bonanza farm in the Far West can produce enough by their labor to serve bread to one thousand persons in New York. If that calculation is correct, then in every community of a thousand people within reach of American grain nine hundred and ninety are released from the necessity of raising food, and are free to produce other useful things. Mr. Atkinson further calculates that one operative in a cotton factory makes sufficient cloth for two hundred and fifty people; in a woollen factory enough for three hundred; while the modern cobbler, working thousand men, or more than one thousand women, with all the boots and shoes they require in a year. In face of this enormous outpour of wealth, where a few men can turn out enough of the necessaries of life for hundreds, how is it that there are people in England starving for want of food? It certainly is no niggardliness of nature. It is no fault of our instruments of production. It must be something terribly far wrong in the way we organize and employ these great resources. There is no need to exaggerate the hardships of the working classes. With-in a boot and shoe factory, furnishes one out being suspected of the heresy that the former days were better that now, we may be allowed to think that the present days should be immeasurably better than they are. It is no doubt true that the working man's kitchen to-day is more luxurious than the banqueting hall of the Middle Ages. But if we compared the noble of those ages with the noble of our own, and the peasant of those ages with the laborer of the present, we should see that, while the one class has risen to a level of luxury undreamt of in the older world, the other is not yet assured of the necessaries of life. We are so familiar, however, with the phenomena of depression of trade and irregular employment, that we do not sufficiently realize how strange it is that such things should be. We need not wonder The general phenomenon we wish to investigate, then, is the unsatisfactory state of the working classes in view of this immense production of wealth. The unsatisfactoriness consists mainly in two things that wages are at all times low The Distribution of Products, p. 76. in comparison with what we might expect, and that employment is irregular. There are two explanations very commonly, given. They are not pressed as logical theories; they are not exactly answers to the same question. They are rather of that dangerous class that describe a phenomenon, and are taken to account for it. The first puts the question, Why are wages low? and answers, On account of bad distribution of wealth. The second puts the question, Why is employment irregular? and answers, Because of over-production. I. Bad distribution. It is said that the present system of industry tends to concentrate wealth in the hands of the few, and keep the masses at a low level. Admitting Mr. Giffen's figures, it is said that all the increase of wealth over population only goes to make the rich richer. Mr. George will have it that, in an old country, and even in a new, wealth can only find one resting-place- the pockets of the landowners. If his theory do not square with the facts of reduced rents and diminishing cultivation, he takes the easy way of ignoring the facts. Mr. Hyndman, on the other hand, points to the long lines of surburban villas, and the new men everywhere planted on the old acres, and gives a very definite answer as to where, in his opinion, the added wealth is going to. More moderate men are content to take Mr. Giffen's figures of the great increase in incomes between £200 and £400, and accept his conclusion that middlemen and retailers are getting the lion's share. But does the phrase "bad distribution" explain anything? At first sight it seems true to say that, if the middle and upper classes are absorbing the increasing wealth, it sufficiently accounts for the comparative poverty of the working classes. But there is an assumption here that requires to be dragged to the light of day — viz., that great wealth at one end of the scale involves great want of it at the other. If wealth comes into the world, and you get it, I can't have it. This is charmingly simple, but it assumes that, in industry, what one gains another loses. The assumption is so common, and so serious, that it deserves a detailed refutation. What do we mean when we say that a man is becoming richer? Do we mean that he actually consumes more upon himself in the way of selfish expenditure? Well, apart from the fact that a man's "self" generally includes his family and his friends, and that expenditure may be "selfish," and yet not condemnable, it is a more difficult matter to be entirely selfish in consumption than we quite realize. A man can only wear one suit of clothes or drive one pair of horses at a time, and, if he go beyond the statutory four meals a day, he only increases the possibilities of indigestion. There are physical limits to such consumption. But even in this be cannot be wholly selfish; cannot greatly increase his consumption without calling in other men to share his abundance. The making of his clothes helps to clothe the tailor. His horses are a source of income to grooms, and stable-men, and horse-dealers. If he rise from beer to champagne he supports the highly skilled labor of the vine-grower instead of the unskilled toil of the hop-picker. No man liveth to himself, and we cannot even die by ourselves; the cost of a sumptuous funeral makes the heart of the undertaker glad, and even the earth grows greener for our dust. So that, if we assume our rich man to spend his wealth merely in selfish consumption, it does not necessarily follow that any one is the poorer for him. In our social system, however, increase of wealth does not mean, to any material extent, increase of this kind of consump tion. Nor does it mean the accumulation of hoards and stores. It means, for the most part, increasing power over the services of other men. The power of sixpence in my pocket depends on the want of sixpence in yours. I may not have a rood of ground or a spare umbrella in my possession, but I have only to flourish a hundred-pound note to have the services of the civilized world at my disposal to the extent of £100. Is any one the poorer then that the rich man hires his services, and pays wages? It is rather curious that, in this matter of making work, common sense has been wiser than the politi cal economy of the old school. Political economy would have sent the squire to London to the Army and Navy Stores to buy his goods in the cheapest market. Common sense has always condemned that as partaking of the vice of absentee landlordism. It has glorified Sir Roger de Coverley as the typical squire and the special providence of the district; buying from the village shops; getting the servants from those bred about the hall gates; organizing and finding and making work for his tenants and dependents. In feudal and semi-feudal times there was little difference between the life of the master and that of the man. Wealth did not mean selfish expenditure. It showed itself in a more liberal table, in wider hospitality, in a greater personal retinue; and these retainers were assuredly not the poorer that the added wealth came first into the hand of one person, presumably the wisest, and was distributed out by him, not as wages, but as provision. But to-day the tie of the cash payment is the strong one. The modern relation of the employer to his hands, with whom he has no personal dealings, has been extended to landlord and tenant, squire and villager. The division of labor and the organization of industry on a large scale have divided classes so sharply and entirely that it is not now so clear that one man's wealth is not another man's poverty. But though disguised, it is, to a great extent, as true as before. However unconscious of personal relations, the rich man and his tradesmen are dependent on each other. The hall is even more dependent on the cottage than the cottage on the hall; for the cottager, thrown on his own resources, could use his hands, where his master, in the same circumstances, would be helpless enough. The rich man cannot increase his pleasures without paying the poor man wages, and so giving over part of his wealth to be spent by others. In fact, almost all expenditure involves a partnership. The one partner may have the honor of directing how the money shall be spent; the spending of it all is a thing that goes beyond him. The hazy idea that one man's wealth involves another man's poverty still induces a good deal of preaching against culpable luxury, without any clear idea of what the culpableness consists in. This unguarded condemnation of luxurious expenditure is a heritage of simpler times and of simpler morals. When the world was poor, wealth had the form of a store of goods. From this store a man was always subtracting something for his subsistence; to it he was bound to add, on the whole, more than he withdrew. There was little command over nature; man had to do the hard work, with only his strong arms for tools; and, as no one could add much, no one had a right to waste much. Luxury was culpable. But our wealth, and our manner of getting wealth, are entirely changed. The hand of man is now known to be a very weak tool, although a very cunning one; so we hand over the artistic work of the world to be done by it, but the hard work we get done for us by the forces of nature we have pressed into our service. The joint factors in wealth production are still, as always, human labor and nat ural powers. But, as time goes on, man does more of the directing, nature more of the working. We cannot toughen our muscles beyond those of the Greek athlete, but we can get the Nasmyth hammer to do the work of a hundred athletes. Parallel to this is a change in the position of various kinds of producing. We do not multiply our necessaries; we direct our industry to the supply of the various comforts and luxuries that are the conditions of refined life. Food-growing, which in earlier times was the most important and most honorable of callings, has passed into the background, just because it is not the material wants of man that are infinite, but the æsthetic. As we get richer we do not ask for more loaves, but more beauty. It is by gradual development, then, that we have risen to the high level of comfort. The increase of industry has been, and must be, in the direction of luxury. The entire fabric of our industrial organization is based on the demands of luxury from increasing numbers. But all this time our morals — so far as we consult our morals in our expenditure -are the morals of a simpler world, and we do not seem to be able to quit our |