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Not the least valuable of the work which Socialists have done has been to collect and to publish the real facts in regard to the social condition of the people. There has been much truth in the past in the old saying that one half the world knew not how the other half lived. But the facts and figures which have been made public by Socialist investigators and statisticians have left little excuse for the person who reads remaining in ignorance of the facts of the actual lives of the people and of the conditions of their work. Any system must be judged by its results. Socialists demand the abolition of landlordism and capitalism, not because these institutions are inherently wrong, but because of the industrial and social results for which they are responsible. If under a system of private landowning and private capitalism, the condition of every individual in the community was all that could be desired, there would be no argument for a change of the system. The first step then, in building up the case for Socialism is to prove that the existing state of things is unfair and unjust by an appeal to the actual facts of the situation. The first thing to do is to prove the existence of a state of things in regard to the distribution of wealth and the prevalence of poverty which no honest or fair-minded person can defend as having any right to exist in a civilised community. Having proved that the widest disparity prevails in the distribution of wealth, and that as a result millions of our population are underfed, underclothed, stunted in body and in mind, and that vice, immorality, drunkenness, insanity, and unutterable misery and suffering are the direct results of this unequal distribution of wealth, it will be necessary to consider if any real and permanent reform can be brought about without a radical change in our industrial system. If we come to the conclusion that it is hopeless to expect a real change without what some Socialists call a Social Revolution, we shall require to prove that the evils of the present system are due to the private ownership of land and industrial capital, and that the substitution of that system by one in which land and capital shall be owned and controlled collectively is essential in order to bring about the abolition of poverty, and the establishment of equality of opportunity for all.

The late Sir Robert Giffen once said, ‘No one can contemplate the social condition of our people without wishing for something like a revolution for the better.’ Socialists are constantly impressing the facts of the condition of the people upon the nation in order to create that desire for a revolution. In the opening chapter of his Progress and Poverty, the late Henry George asks what a scientist of the eighteenth century would have imagined would be the result of the scientific and mechanical discoveries and inventions which we know to-day, if he could have foreseen them in his imagination. If he had known that within the next century the productive power of labour was going to be increased twenty, fifty, a hundred fold, he would have come to no other conclusion than that this increased power to produce the necessaries of life would result in abolishing all poverty, and in lightening men’s toil almost to the extent of making their lives a perpetual holiday from manual work. But writing fifty years after the harnessing of steam power to new machinery, John Stuart Mill said it was doubtful if all our labour-saving machinery had lightened the day’s toil of a single individual. This statement may put the experience of that fifty years in an exaggerated form, but there is considerable substance of truth in his words. The machine age has not brought the abolition of poverty—it has not materially shortened the hours or lightened the labour of the masses. We have probably a larger number of people in hopeless poverty to-day—though the percentage of the whole population may be less—than there has been at any previous period of our industrial history. The advantages which have been brought by these scientific discoveries and mechanical inventions have not gone to the masses of the people, but have been appropriated by a small section of the nation, and have made them rich beyond the dreams of an Arabian romance.

The poverty of the poor is certainly not due to an insufficiency of wealth in the country. It does not spring from the niggardliness of nature. It does not arise from the over-population of the world, for the increase of wealth is growing faster than the increase of population. The total value in pounds of the wealth produced, and of the services rendered annually in the United Kingdom is not actually known, but the investigations of a number of eminent economists and statisticians have given us figures which may be taken as approximately correct. In his book, National Progress in Wealth and Trade, Professor Bowley, Teacher of Statistics, University of London, says that the estimate of the National Income of the United Kingdom as being £1,600,000,000 in 1891 has never been seriously questioned. From that basis he estimated that the total in 1903 would be very little short of £2,000,000,000 (two thousand millions). Following the method adopted by Professor Bowley of estimating the increase from the increase in population and the amount of income observed by the Inland Revenue Commissioners, it brings out the conclusion that in 1911 the total National Income would be not less than £2,250,000,000. Sir Robert Giffen’s estimate is somewhat less than that of Professor Bowley, he estimating the total at £1,750,000,000 in 1903. Mr L. G. Chiozza Money has made an estimate for the year 1907 which puts the total at £1,710,000,000. This is obviously a very low estimate, and is not supported by any other statistician. The material for estimating the capital value of the wealth of the United Kingdom is insufficient to arrive at a close computation. It is generally taken as being about £15,000,000,000 (fifteen thousand millions). The addition to the capital wealth of the United Kingdom is at the rate of £200,000,000 a year.^[1]

The question now arises as to how this huge National Income and this stupendous volume of national wealth is divided among the population. The Inland Revenue Commissioners are able to account for £1,045,000,000. of the National Income. That is the gross total of the income which came under their observation in 1911. In his evidence before the Dilke Committee on Income Tax, the Chairman of the Board of Inland Revenue estimated the number of individuals who came within the Income Tax limit at 1,100,000. This, with their families, represents a population of about 5,000,000. That brings out the fact that one-ninth of the population enjoy one-half of the National Income. The incomes of the class who compose the one-ninth vary enormously, the great bulk of the number having incomes below £700 a year. Out of the 1,100,000 persons assessed to Income Tax, 750,000 belong to this class.^[2] On the other hand it was estimated^[3] that those with individual incomes of over £5000 a year absorbed £200,000,000 of the National Income. The number of such is about 11,000.

We have reliable statistics as to the incomes of that great body of the labouring class, which, with their families, number forty millions of the population of the United Kingdom. In a lecture delivered in May, 1911, Professor Bowley estimated that about 8,000,000 men are employed in regular occupations in the United Kingdom, and that their full weekly wages when in ordinary work were as follows: 4 per cent. under 15s.; 8 per cent. between 15s. and 20s.; 20 per cent. between 20s. and 25s.; 21 per cent. between 25s. and 30s.; 21 per cent. between 30s. and 35s.; 13 per cent. between 35s. and 40s.; 7 per cent. between 40s. and 45s.; and 6 per cent. over 45s. Thirty-two per cent. of the number earn, according to this estimate, less than 25s. a week. But an examination of the Board of Trade Returns on Wages shows conclusively that Professor Bowley has largely over-estimated the number of better paid workmen. In the cotton trade, 40·4 per cent. of the adult men earn less than 25s. a week. In the woollen trade, 67·4 per cent. of the men earn below 30s. a week. In the linen trade, 44·4 per cent. of the men earn less than 20s. a week. Taking all the textile trades of the United Kingdom, the actual earnings of the adult men in September, 1906, show that 48·3 per cent, earned below 25s. a week. Of bricklayers’ labourers, 55·9 per cent. are paid under 25s. a week; of masons’ labourers, 67·6 per cent, under 25s.; and builders’ labourers below that figure are 51·7 per cent. of the whole class.^[4] The wages of women employed in some of the largest and most profitable trades are very low. In the textile trades 17·7 per cent. of the adult women are paid less than 8s. a week, and 55·7 per cent. earn below 15s. a week.

The ownership of the capital wealth of the United Kingdom is distributed in a similar proportion between the several classes as the National Income is distributed. In 1910 there were 39,429 estates for probate or administration of a net value exceeding £100. The total net value of these 39,429 estates was £283,662,000. Only one person in sixteen who died left property worth over £100. But of the 39,429 persons who left property in 1910, 17,767 left less than £1000 each. The total net value of these estates amounted to just over £12,000,000, that is to say that the other half of this 39,429 left £270,000,000. The great bulk of the wealth left at death is owned by a small percentage of those who leave any property at all. In 1910 there were 1963 persons died and left between £10,000 and £20,000, but only 434 whose estates were valued at between £20,000 and £25,000. The number of people who left over £100,000 was only 288; and there were five millionaires’ estates, the total value of which was £24,000,000—that is to say at that one end, five persons left twice as much as the 17,767 at the other end. Taking all the persons who died in that year, over 700,000, we find that one of these five millionaires left more wealth than 700,000 others put together.

This unequal division of income and wealth naturally results in wide social inequalities, and in the case of the rich, to the expenditure of large sums upon luxury and vice, and in the case of the poor, to all the misery and suffering which are invariably associated with poverty. The insufficiency of the husband’s income leads to the necessary employment of married women in factories with all the physical injuries which such labour brings, when accompanied by the additional burden of household duties and child rearing. The insufficient wages of the father causes the children to be taken away from school before they have received an education equipping them for industrial life or civic duties. The children of the working-classes when born, have not one-half the chance of surviving that the children of the well-to-do have. The infantile death-rate in the working-class quarters of an industrial town is from one and a half to two and a half times that of the infantile death-rate in the quarters of the richer classes. Figures supplied by Dr Dukes to the Commission on Physical Training (Scotland), show that when fully grown the children of the working-classes are about 2½ inches shorter and 16 pounds lighter, on the average, than the children of the well-to-do. The evidence given before the Committee on Physical Deterioration (England), in 1904 revealed an appalling state of physical condition among the working-classes, due to insufficiency of nourishing food, bad housing, and ignorance,—all the direct outcome of poverty. In the five years 1904-8, no less than 107,000 recruits for the Army were rejected as being unfit.

The liability to accident and premature death is far greater among the poor than among the rich. The number of fatal industrial accidents in the United Kingdom from January, 1910, to June, 1912, was 11,566. The poverty of the workers drives them into overcrowded and insanitary tenements, where disease and death find their natural prey. Three great and wealthy towns in the North of England (Newcastle, Gateshead, and Sunderland), had at the Census of 1901 over 30 per cent. of the population living in a state of overcrowding. The Scottish towns were in a much worse condition. In Glasgow, 54 per cent. of the population were living more than two persons to one room, and in Dundee 49 per cent. In the great and wealthy city of Glasgow, 16·2 per cent. of the whole population were living in one-roomed tenements. Dr Leslie Mackenzie has published the results of his examination of children from these one-roomed tenements in Glasgow. He examined 72,857 children, and discovered that the average height of a boy from a one-roomed tenement was 4·7 inches below that of a boy coming from a four-roomed tenement. Investigations made by the Medical Officer of Liverpool have produced results of a similar character, showing how the poverty of the parents and the unwholesome conditions under which the children are reared rob them of height and weight and general physical development.

The insufficient incomes of the working-class are not assured to them in return for a willingness to work. There is always the prospect of unemployment before the eyes of the working man. Over a number of years, 5 per cent. of the organised workers are on the average unemployed. The lowest percentage of unemployment for the United Kingdom is about 2·5. When this unusual figure is reached it means, spread over the whole working population of fourteen millions, an unemployed army of 350,000 persons. The privation which is involved in even a short period of unemployment to a family which is never in receipt of an income more than enough to meet the daily necessities, cannot be imagined by those who have never had such a painful experience. In addition to the liability to unemployment, there is the risk of disablement, as a result of which the workman and his family are thrown upon the hated Poor Law system. Over a period of 15 years up to the end of 1911, the average number of persons always in receipt of Poor Law relief has been over a million. The Old Age Pensions Act has proved that with very few exceptions the workers who pass the age of 70 are without means of support, having been unable by a long life of useful labour to save enough to keep them in the bare necessaries of life when no longer able to work. It was stated in the Report of the Royal Commission on the Aged Poor, that practically one-half of the workers who reach the age of 65 were dependent upon the Poor Law; and, as the experience of the Old Age Pensions Act has shown, of the rest, the great proportion were maintained by the self-denial of children and friends little better off than themselves.

The poverty and hardship of the life of the working-classes lead them into crime, and drive them to drink and to suicide, and send them to insane asylums. In the year 1909 there were 735,604 persons apprehended and prosecuted in England and Wales for crimes of all descriptions. There were over 50,000 cases of larceny, and 12,000 cases of burglary, housebreaking, and shopbreaking. There has been in recent years a very notable increase in the number of serious crimes against property. The number of cases of suicide is increasing at an alarming rate. The increasing severity of the struggle to make a living is largely responsible for this, and for the increase in the number of insane. In 1891, the number of suicides was 2459; in 1901, it was 3106; and in 1911, it had risen to 3544. In the last ten years there has been an increase of 22·5 per cent. in the number of persons detained in lunatic asylums. In their Report for 1907, the Commissioners of Lunacy say 2 per cent. of the increase was due to ‘privation,’ and 19·3 per cent. to ‘mental stress.’ Below the ordinary working-class whose condition of life is one of unceasing struggle to obtain the bare necessaries of life, and a struggle which in such a large proportion of cases does not avail to avert actual privation, there is a submerged class of homeless, vagrant, unemployable, criminal persons, who are the refuse heap of our social system,—the products of a system which makes these beings at one end as the price of millionaires at the other. The London County Council has undertaken five censuses of London’s homeless poor, and on the last occasion in 1910, on a cold and bitter night in February, there were found 2700 men and women and children crouched on staircases, under arches, and in the streets, having neither shelter nor means. On the same night the Salvation Army and other shelters were accommodating an equal number of homeless human beings. In that great and wealthy city there were these thousands of men and women whose condition of poverty and wretchedness was far deeper than that of the most abject savage.

These facts and figures of the industrial and social condition of the working-class give one side of the picture of the present social system. On the other hand we have a class which is so rich that human ingenuity cannot devise any rational means of spending its wealth. The daily newspapers report from time to time items of expenditure on luxuries and frivolities which, when remembered in connection with the lot of the toiling millions, make one think that all these pictures of social contrasts must be a hideous nightmare. In the Daily Mirror for December, 1906, was reported an interview with a big West End tradesman, who had been asked to give information as to the sum on which a society lady might manage to keep in the height of fashion. The statement had been made by a New York leader of fashion that ‘to dress smartly, a lady must spend at least £40,000 a year.’ The West End tradesman gave details of the expenditure upon dress of the Englishwoman of fashion. These total up to an expenditure of £10,836 a year. ‘Of course,’ the tradesman observed, ‘the number of women who spend that amount is comparatively few, but still it is a very fair estimate of the extravagant woman’s yearly dress bill.’ As a confirmation of this extraordinary statement, it may be mentioned that the London Daily Chronicle reported at length, on March 4, 1906, the trial of an action in the High Court in which a lady of fashion was sued for a dress account, when the lady made the admission that she spent between £8000 and £9000 a year.

The newspapers are constantly reporting other instances of the extravagant expenditure and luxurious living of the rich. The enormous prices which are paid for pictures, antique furniture, and silver, arise out of the fact that there are people so rich that they can afford to give any sum to satisfy a whim, or to possess some article, perfectly useless in itself, which has the merit of rarity. Paragraphs like the following are taken at random from the columns of the London daily press:—

‘The prevalent complaint of the scarcity of money found no echo in Christie’s big room yesterday, where there was sold a remarkably rich collection of old Chinese porcelain. The first thirty lots realised an aggregate of not far short of 8000 guineas, or the rather unique average of just over 282 guineas apiece for these precious examples of the artist-potter’s work of the Kang-He and Ming periods.’

‘Huge prices were the rule yesterday at the sale of jewels at Messrs Debenham & Storr. Among the lots were an exquisite ruby set with two brilliantly shaped brilliants and a graduated collet necklace of forty-eight brilliants. The pearl necklace was knocked down for £4500, a handsome collier de chien for £1975, whilst a single row pearl necklace ran to £5300.’

‘Society’s demands on Mr Scott, the Burlington Arcade dog outfitter, for the coming winter include a dog’s bedstead, fur coats, handkerchiefs, laced boots (half a guinea a set), silk-braided blankets, motor goggles, and nickel-plated foot-warmers for Fido when travelling.’

The extreme contrasts of riches and poverty, of extravagance and privation, which are familiar to every observant person in the United Kingdom to-day, are by no means confined to this country. The same contrasts are to be found in every industrial nation. The United States of America, a comparatively new country, with vast and rich natural resources, can supply, perhaps, even more striking facts of the concentration of wealth in the hands of a few, and of the appalling extravagance of this class. In January, 1907, Mr Charles Stedman Hanks placed before the Boston (Mass.) Chamber of Commerce a striking summary of the results of an investigation of data collected by the Inter-State Commerce Commission. Mr Hanks declares that if the present order of things continues it will only be a question of time when the Trusts will have the absolute ownership of the property of that country. He estimated that already they control nearly one quarter of it.

The Census Report gives the total of National Wealth of the United States in 1904 at £21,421,000,000, an increase of one-third in four years. Of this immense aggregate £2,249,000,000 lies in the steam railway trusts, £1,976,000,000 in the manufacturing trusts, £720,000,000 in industrial trusts, £444,000,000 in street car trusts. The further statement is made that more than seven-eighths of the wealth of the United States is owned by less than 1 per cent. of the population, leaving one-eighth for the remaining 99 per cent. of the people. Further, of the total annual income of the country, one-half goes to one-tenth of the people and the other half is divided among the remaining nine-tenths.

The London Times of 28th August, 1908, had an article on ‘Rich and Poor in America,’ in which statements were made which support those contained in the preceding paragraph. But this article gives some facts as to the condition of the people of this great country who are at the other end of the social scale. ‘In New York City, according to official reports, two-thirds of the inhabitants live in tenement houses, and in these tenements there are 350,000 living-rooms into which, because they are windowless, no ray of sunlight ever enters. In fairly prosperous times there are at least 10,000,000—some careful statisticians say 15,000,000 to 20,000,000—people in America who are always underfed and poorly housed; and of these, 4,000,000 are public paupers. Little children to the number of 1,700,000 who should be at school are wage-earners. One in every ten in New York who die has a pauper’s burial; at the present ratio of deaths from tuberculosis, 10,000,000 now living will succumb to that disease; 60,463 families in Manhattan, New York, were evicted from their homes in 1903.’

The Census Returns for 1900 show that in the United States in the previous year 6,468,964 persons, or 22·3 per cent. of all workers, had been unemployed for some part of the year. Over 56 per cent. of this unemployment had been due to inability to get work. As in this country, so in the United States, the condition of the workers as described in the statements quoted is not due to the lack of a sufficiency of wealth in the country. The Census Bureau at Washington has supplied the following figures as to the increase of the wealth of the United States since 1850:—

Total Wealth in 1850	$7,000,000,000
In 1860	$16,000,000,000
In 1870	$24,000,000,000
In 1890	$69,000,000,000
In 1900	$88,000,000,000
In 1904	$107,000,000,000

There is no need to give the figures in regard to insanity, industrial accidents, strikes, suicides, illiteracy, as they apply to the United States. It is sufficient to say that these indications of a unhealthy industrial and social system are to be found in the United States in a more aggravated form than they have been shown to exist in the United Kingdom.

The facts and figures given in this chapter constitute the Social Problem. They prove the existence of a state of things which is indefensible on every ground. They are a mockery of our boasted civilisation, and a menace to the stability of society. The first duty of a nation is to so organise its resources that the means to attain and maintain a healthy and civilised existence shall be within the reach of all in return for reasonable labour. Our natural resources, our scientific knowledge, our mechanical aids are of no advantage to the people unless they are the means of lightening arduous toil, of making the struggle for a living less severe, of giving men more leisure for reasonable recreation, and of bringing the advantages of progressive knowledge to establish a higher civilisation which shall be enjoyed by all the members of the community. No system can endure which is responsible for starved human beings by the thousand seeking a night’s shelter in some archway or staircase, while dogs are sleeping in bedsteads covered with silk-braided blankets, with nickel-plated warmers at their feet. Evil contrasts such as we have described spring from some deep-seated cause, and our next duty is to inquire whether there is any hope of securing a juster distribution of wealth without some radical change in the system by which wealth is now owned and distributed.

[1]	Giffen, Essays in Finance, Vol. II., page 407.

[2]	Dilke Committee Report, page 227.

[3]	Ibid., page 227.

[4]	For a full treatment of this wages question see the writer’s The Living Wage.