[D] Address by the President to the Economic Science and
Statistics Section at the Dover meeting of the British
Association for the Advancement of Science.
The prime concern of the economist and of the statistician is
the condition of the people. Other matters which engage their
attention--particular problems, questions of history, discussions of
method, developments of theory--all derive their ultimate importance
from their bearing upon this central subject. The statistician measures
the changing phenomena of the production, distribution and consumption
of wealth, which to a large extent reflect and determine the material
condition of the people. The economist analyzes the motives of these
phenomena, and endeavors to trace the connection between cause and
effect. He is unable to push his analysis far without a firm mastery
of the theory of value, the perfecting of which has been the chief
stride made by economic science in the nineteenth century. When we read
the ‘Wealth of Nations’ we are forced to admit that in sheer sagacity
Adam Smith is unsurpassed by any of his successors. It is only when
we come to his imperfect and unconnected views upon value that we
feel the power of increased knowledge. J. S. Mill supposed in 1848
that the last word had been said on the theory of value. In his third
book he writes: “In a state of society in which the industrial system
is entirely founded on purchase and sale ... the question of value
is fundamental. Almost every speculation respecting the economical
interests of a society thus constituted implies some theory of value;
the smallest error on this subject infects with corresponding error all
our other conclusions, and anything vague or misty in our conception of
it creates confusion and uncertainty in everything else.” And he adds:
“Happily, there is nothing in the laws of value which remains for the
present or any future writer to clear up; the theory of the subject is
complete.”
We know now that he was wrong. Thanks in the main to economists
still alive, and especially to the mathematical economists, we have
at length a theory of value so formally exact that, whatever may be
added to it in the future, time can take nothing from it; while it is
sufficiently flexible to lend itself as well to a _régime_ of monopoly
as to one of competition. Yet our confidence in this instrument of
analysis is far from inspiring us with the assurance which has done so
much to discredit economics by provoking its professors to dogmatize
upon problems with the whole facts of which they were imperfectly
acquainted. Given certain conditions of supply and certain conditions
of demand, the economist should have no doubt as to the resulting
determination of value; but he is more than ever alert to make sure
that he has all the material factors of the case before him; that he
understands the facts and their mutual relation before he ventures
to pronounce an opinion upon any mixed question. He must have the
facts before he can analyze them. A small array of syllogisms, which,
as Bacon says, “master the assent and not the subject,” are not an
adequate equipment for him. He sees more and more the need for careful
and industrious investigation, and prominent among the subjects which
await his trained observation are the condition of the people and the
related subject of the consumption of wealth. Training is, indeed,
indispensable. Every social question has its purely economic elements
for the skilled economist to unravel, and when this part of his task
has been achieved, he is at an advantage in approaching the other parts
of it, while his habit of mind helps him to know what to look out for
and what to expect.
It is a curious paradox that, busying ourselves as we do with the
condition of the people, we are lamentably lacking in precision in our
knowledge of the economic life and state of the British people in the
present day. Political economy has, however, followed the lines of
development of political power. At one time it was, as the Germans say,
cameralistic--an affair of the council chamber, a question of the power
and resources of the king. Taking a wider but still restricted view of
society, it became capitalistic, identifying the economic interests of
the community to a too great extent with those of the capitalist class.
It has at length become frankly democratic, looking consciously and
directly to the prosperity of the people at large.
Thus, then, we have at once a more accurate theory, a livelier sense
of caution as to its limitations in practice, and the widest possible
field of study. So far as most of us are concerned, we might as well
spend our time in verifying the ready reckoner as in tracing and
retracing the lines of pure theory. These tools are made for use.
Economic science is likely to make the most satisfactory progress if we
watch the social forces that surround us, detecting the operation of
economic law in all its manifestations, and in observing, coördinating
and recording the facts of economic life. It is not enough, to borrow
the language of the biologist (part of which he himself borrowed from
the old economist), to talk of the struggle for existence, the survival
of the fittest and of evolution. We want, above all, his spirit and his
method--the careful, minute, systematic observation of life as affected
by environment, heredity and habit. Different problems are brought to
the front by different circumstances and appeal to different minds;
but at all times and to all economists the condition of the people
is of chief interest, and the consumption of wealth is so closely
connected with it that it might seem superfluous to plead for its
study. Yet some such plea is necessary. The arts of production improve
apace. The victories of science are rapidly utilized by manufacturers
anxious to make a fortune. Even here the descriptive study of the
subject is hampered by the trade secrets involved in many processes,
and by a feeling that production may safely be left to the unresting
intelligence of captains of industry, so that the onlooker is chiefly
concerned in this branch of the subject with solicitude for the health
and safety of the workmen employed. The departments of distribution
and exchange appeal especially to the pride of intellect. The delicate
theorems of value in all their branches--wages, rent, interest,
profits, the problems of taxation, the alluring study of currency, the
mechanism of banking and exchange--have attracted the greatest share of
the economist’s attention. On the practical side of distribution the
growth of trade unions, the spread of education, the improved standard
of living, have increased the bargaining power of the working classes
and combined with other causes to effect a gratifying improvement in
the distribution of wealth, so that they receive a growing share of the
growing national dividend. The practical and the speculative aspects
alike of the consumption of wealth have received less consideration.
Nobody sees his way to a fortune through the spread of more knowledge
of domestic economy in workmen’s homes; and the scientific observer
has curbed his curiosity before what might seem an inquisitorial
investigation into the question, what becomes of wages? Economists long
ago discovered the necessity of distinguishing between money wages and
real wages. It is now necessary for us to distinguish between real
wages and utilities--not to stop at the fact that so many shillings a
week _might_ procure such and such necessaries, comforts, or luxuries,
but to ascertain how they _are_ expended. From the first we can deduce
what the economic condition of the people might be; from the second we
shall know what it is. And when we know what it is we shall see more
clearly what with more wisdom it might become. Wealth, after all, is a
means to an end. It is not enough to maximize wealth; we must strive
to maximize utilities. And we can no more judge of the condition of
a people from its receipts alone, than we can judge of the financial
condition of a nation from a mere statement of its revenues.
The condition of the people has, of course, improved, and is improving.
Public hygiene has made great progress, and houses are better and
more sanitary, though for this and other reasons rents have risen.
Wages are higher. Commodities are cheaper. Coöperation and the
better organization of retail business, giving no credit, have saved
some of the profits of middlemen for the benefit of the consumer,
while authority fights without ceasing against frauds in weights
and measures, and adulteration. Free libraries, museums, picture
galleries, parks, public gardens and promenades have multiplied, and
it is almost sufficient to observe that no one seems to be too poor
to command the use of a bicycle. But with all this progress it is to
be feared that housekeeping is no better understood than it was two
centuries ago--perhaps not even so well. In the interval it has become
enormously simplified. The complete housewife is no longer a brewer,
a baker, a dyer, a tailor and a host of other specialists rolled into
one. But among the working classes the advent of the factory system
has increased the employment of women and girls away from home to
such an extent that many of them now marry with a minimum of domestic
experience, and are with the best intentions the innocent agents of
inefficiency and waste, even in this simplified household.
If we were suddenly swallowed up by the ocean, it appears probable that
the foreign student would find it easier to describe from existing
documents the life and home of the British craftsman in the middle
ages than of his descendant of to-day. In part, no doubt, our fiscal
system, with its few taxes upon articles of food and its light pressure
on the working classes, is responsible for this neglect. During the
Napoleonic war Pitt sent for Arthur Young to ask him what were the
ordinary and necessary expenses of a workman’s family, and the question
would again become one of practical politics if any large addition
were required in the proceeds of indirect taxation. Taxation has the
one advantage of providing us with statistics. We know tolerably well
the facts in the mass about the consumption of tea and coffee, dried
fruits and tobacco, and of alcohol, while the income tax (aided in
the near future by returns of the death duties) may give us some idea
of the stratification of the wealthier classes. But the details of
consumption are still obscure. It has already been suggested that some
restraint may arise from the sentiment that individuals are likely to
resent what they may regard as a prying into their affairs. But when we
travel abroad we are curious to notice, and do notice without giving
offence, the dress, the habits and the food of peasants and workmen;
and it is difficult to resist the conclusion that we are less observant
at home because these common and trivial details appear to us unworthy
of attention. In his ‘Principles of Economics’ Professor Marshall says:
“Perhaps £100,000,000 annually are spent, even by the working classes,
and £400,000,000 by the rest of the population of England, in ways that
do little or nothing towards making life nobler or truly happier.”
And, again, speaking before the Royal Statistical Society in 1893:
“Something like the whole imperial revenue, say 100 millions a year,
might be saved if a sufficient number of able women went about the
country and induced the other women to manage their households as they
did themselves.” These figures show, at any rate, the possibilities of
greatness in the economic progress which may result from attention to
the humblest details of domestic life.
Economics, like other sciences, lies under a great debt of obligation
to French pioneers. The physiocrats, or _économistes_, of the
eighteenth century, were the first school of writers to make it worthy
of the name of a science. In Cournot, France gave us a giant of
originality in pure theory. In Comte, we have a philosopher fruitful
in suggestion to the narrower economist. In Le Play, we have a writer
as yet little known in England, but to whom recognition and respect
are gradually coming for his early perception of the importance of
ascertaining the facts of consumption, and it is to Le Play’s ‘family
budgets,’ the receipts and expenses of workmen’s families, that I
desire especially to call attention. I have given elsewhere an account
of his life and work.[E] Broadly speaking, he sets himself by the
comparative study of workmen’s families in different countries of
Europe to arrive at the causes of well-being and of misery among
the laboring classes. The subject was too large to lead him in many
directions to very precise conclusions. We are reminded in reading
him of an incident at a dinner of the Political Economy Club in 1876,
when Mr. Robert Lowe propounded the question: “What are the more
important results which have followed from the publication of the
‘Wealth of Nations’ just one hundred years ago?” Some of the most
enthusiastic admirers of Adam Smith were present, Mr. Gladstone and
M. Léon Say among the number; and Mr. Lowe trenchantly declared that
it all came to this: “The causes of wealth are two, industry and
thrift; the causes of poverty are two, idleness and waste.” It was
left to Mr. W. E. Forster to make the rugged remark: “You don’t want
to go to Adam Smith for that--you can get that out of the Proverbs of
Solomon.” And Le Play’s conclusions frequently go still further back,
to the Decalogue. There are, however, many observations, suggestive
and original, upon the material facts, the economic life, of the
families he brought under review. And we are now concerned rather with
his method than with his conclusions. Given half a dozen Le Plays
applying their minds to the study of the consumption of wealth among
the working classes of England, we might expect soon to see a greater
advance in comfort, a greater rise in the standard of life, than
improved arts of production alone are likely to yield in a generation.
Certain English writers had, indeed, prepared family budgets before
Le Play arose. But their method was usually incomplete except for the
specific purpose they had before them. David Davies and Sir F. Eden
were chiefly concerned with the poor law, Arthur Young and Cobbett with
agricultural politics, Dudley Baxter and Leone Levi with taxation.
Le Play may fairly be called the father of the scientific family
budget. His studies of four English families[F] are the most complete
economic pictures of English popular life to be found in literature.
With the aid of some local authority he chose what was thought a
fairly typical family, and then, frankly explaining his scientific
object and securing confidence, he set himself to study it. Nothing
of economic interest is too unimportant for him to record. A minute
inventory and valuation of clothes, furniture and household goods;
a detailed account, item by item, of income from all sources and of
expenditure upon all objects for a year, with the quantities and prices
of foods, &c.; a description of the family, member by member, their
past history, their environment, how they came to be where they are and
to earn their living as they do; their resources in the present, their
provision for the future; their meals, hygiene and recreations; their
social, moral, political and religious observances--nothing escapes
him. And the whole is organized, classified, fitted into a framework
identical for all cases, with the painstaking and methodical industry
of the naturalist. Contrasted with this the realism of novelists, the
occasional excursions of journalists, the observations of professed
economists, are pitiably incomplete. As early as 1857 Le Play found
one ardent admirer in England, Mr. W. L. Sargant, whose “Economy of
the Laboring Classes,” avowedly inspired by Le Play, is a valuable and
interesting piece of work. Since then, however, with the magnificent
exception of Mr. Charles Booth, little has been done to throw light
upon the mode of life of the wage-earners of England. The Board of
Trade heralded the formation of its Labor Department by issuing a blue
book--unhappily without sequel--entitled “Returns of Expenditure by
Working Men,” in 1889, and the Economic Club has published a useful
collection of studies in ‘Family Budgets,’ 1896. But we shall probably
still depend very much upon foreign observers for fuller knowledge of
the subject. M. René Lavollée, an adherent who may almost be called
a colleague of Le Play, has devoted to England a whole volume of his
important work ‘Les Classes Ouvrières en Europe: études sur leur
situation matérielle et morale.’[G] M. Urbain Guérin, another member
of the Société d’Economie Sociale, founded by Le Play to carry on his
work, has recently added a study of a tanner’s family in Nottingham
to Le Play’s gallery of portraits; and some of the young members of
the Musée Social and the Ecole Libre des Sciences Politiques have come
among us animated with the same scientific curiosity. A vivid (and, so
far as Newcastle is concerned, a trustworthy) sketch by a German miner,
“How the English Workman Lives,” just translated into English, is our
latest debt to foreign observers. It may be hoped that the British
Association, largely attended as it is by persons who would shrink from
more ambitious scientific labors, will furnish some workers ready to do
their country the very real service of recording such facts as they can
collect about the economic habits of our own people, and so helping us
to know ourselves.
[E] _Harvard Quarterly Journal of Economics_, vol. iv., 1890;
_Journal of Royal Statistical Society_, March, 1893;
_Palgrave’s Dictionary of Political Economy_, _s. v._ Le
Play, 1896.
[F] _Les Ouvriers Europeens_, Paris, folio, 1855.
[G] Paris, 1896, tom. iii., 656 pp., large 8vo.
Consider, for a moment, the consumption of food. To the ordinary
English workman life would seem unendurable without white wheaten
bread. Other forms of bread he knows there are, but he has unreasoning
prejudices against wholemeal bread--the food of workhouses and
prisons--and against rye bread or other kinds of bread, the food of
foreigners. But in many parts of Europe the working classes have no
bread. Cereals of some sort, prepared in some way, they of course
employ. Wheat, oats, rye, barley, maize, buckwheat, even chestnuts, are
used indifferently in different places, and rice and potatoes are among
the substitutes. What is the relative value of these as foodstuffs, and
what is the best mode of preparing them? The reasons which induced men
in the middle ages to consume the cereals of their own neighborhood
have been so much weakened by the cheapening of transport and the
international specialization of industries, that the conservatism of
food habits is brought into strong relief when we find neighboring
peoples abandoning, first in town and then in country, marked
distinctions of national costumes, but clinging everywhere to national
differences of food. We are perhaps on the eve of considerable changes
here. Two years ago an American economist told me in Boston that fruit
had been the great ally of the workmen in a recent severe strike. There
had been an exceptionally large crop of bananas, which were sold at
one cent apiece, and the strikers had sustained themselves and their
families almost entirely upon bananas at a trifling cost--very greatly
below their usual expense for food. Returning to London I found bananas
on sale in the streets for a halfpenny. No doubt they were consumed
here in addition to, and not in substitution for, ordinary food; but
they illustrate the fact that the foods of other latitudes are no
longer the sole luxury of the rich, but are brought within the reach of
all classes, and that our popular food habits need no longer be made
to conform to the narrow range of former days, but may be put upon a
wider rational basis. The vegetarians, largely dependent upon other
countries, have recognized this. The chemist and the physiologist might
give us great assistance in these matters. Most of the calculations
which I have seen as to the constituents of foods, their heat-giving
and nutritive properties, appear to ignore the greater or less facility
with which the different foods are assimilated. It is surprising that
rice, in some respects the most economical of all grains, needing
no milling, easily cooked and easily digested, is not more largely
consumed by the poorer families in this country.
The effect upon our food habits of the introduction of railways and
the supply of comparatively cheap fuel to every household is almost
incalculable. But for this the consumption of tea, perhaps even of
potatoes where there is no peat, would be very small. The preference
of the French for liquid, and of the English for solid, food, has
been attributed to the greater relative facilities which the French
once enjoyed for making a fire, though the persistence (if not the
origin) of our popular habits in this respect probably lies rather
in the fact that a Frenchwoman’s cookery makes greater demands upon
her time and attention. One result of this preference is that the
essential juices of meat preserved by the French in soups and ragouts
are with us to a large extent absolutely wasted. Owners of small house
properties complain that, however well trapped their sinks may be,
the pipes are constantly choked, and that the mysterious mischief is
almost invariably cured by liberal doses of boiling water, which melt
the solidified fats cast away in a state of solution. The number of
persons who died of starvation in the administrative county of London
in 1898, or whose death was accelerated by privation, amounted to 48;
and we shall be pretty safe in estimating the total number in the
United Kingdom at something less than 500. The common and inevitable
reflection is that they might have been easily relieved from the
superfluities of the rich; but it is true also that their sufficient
sustenance was destroyed many times over through the ignorance of the
poor. It would be difficult to find an English cookery book which a
workman’s wife would not reject as too fanciful and ambitious to be
practical. A little French treatise, ‘La parfaite Cuisinière, ou l’Art
d’utiliser les Restes,’ strikes in its title, at any rate, the keynote
of the popular domestic economy of which we stand much in need in
England. Housekeeping, even the humblest, is a skilled business. To
know what to buy, how to use it and how to utilize waste does not come
by the light of nature. If more knowledge and more imagination were
devoted to the teaching of cookery in our board schools, the family
meal might be made more varied, more appetizing, more attractive and
more economical, leaving a larger margin for the comforts, culture
and recreations which help to develop the best social qualities. A
happy family is a family of good citizens. It would be discourteous
to another section of this Association to quote without reserve the
_mot_ of Brillat-Savarin: “He who discovers a new dish does more for
the happiness of mankind than he who discovers a new planet.” We must
stipulate that the new dish effects an improvement in the economy of
the working classes.
Take, again, the consumption of coal. Mr. Sargant says, “It is
impossible to say how much of the superiority of English health
and longevity is owing to the use of open fireplaces”; probably a
considerable part is owing to it. We all know how close and stifling
is the atmosphere of a room heated by a stove, and how much more
difficult it is to keep a room perfectly ventilated in summer than it
is in winter, when the fire is constantly changing the air. It may be
true that three fourths of the heat of our fireplaces passes up the
chimney and is lost to us; but we gain far more advantage by the fresh
air constantly introduced into the room. Now, with improved grates and
improved fireplaces we may retain all the advantages of the open fire
without so great a waste either of the substance of the consumer or of
the national stock of coal; and attention is already being devoted to
this fact in middle-class households, but some time must yet elapse
before the advantage is reaped by the working classes. At a former
meeting of this Association Mr. Edward Atkinson exhibited a portable
oven or cooking-stove, which was a marvel of simplicity and economy.
He has described it at length in his ‘Science of Nutrition,’ 1892.
He argues that the attempts to combine cooking with the warming of a
room or house are absurdly wasteful; that almost the whole of the fuel
used in cooking is wasted; and that nine tenths of the time devoted to
watching the process of cooking is wasted; and he estimates the waste
of food from bad cooking in the United States at $1,000,000,000 a year.
I have not, however, heard of his oven being at all extensively used.
Upon the thorny subject of dress it is perilous to venture; but it
is impossible to be in the neighborhood of a London park on a Sunday
afternoon without feeling that the efforts of domestic servants to
follow the rapidly changing vagaries of fashion are carried to a
pernicious degree of waste. The blouse of the French workman and the
bare head of the Parisian factory-girl or flower-girl are infinitely
more pleasing than the soiled and frowsy woolens or the dowdy hats of
their English fellows, nor does the difference of climate afford an
adequate explanation of the difference of habit. We must perhaps admit
a greater dislike in England to any external indication of a difference
in wealth by a costume different in kind. M. Lavollée, after referring
to the low price of the ready-made suits which the English factories
“fling by the million on the markets of the world, including their
own,” adds: “This extraordinary cheapness is, however, not always
without inconvenience to the consumer. If the clothes he buys cost
little, they are not lasting, and their renewal becomes in the long
run very burdensome. This renewal is, too, the more frequent in that
the wife of the English workman is in general far from skillful in
sewing and mending. Whether she lacks inclination, or the necessary
training, or whether the fatigues of a too frequent maternity make her
_rôle_ as a housewife too difficult for her to support, the woman of
the people is generally, on the other side of the Channel, a rather
poor cook, an indifferent needle-woman and a still more indifferent
hand at repairs.” As a consequence, he says, the English workman has
often no alternative but to wear his garments in holes or to replace
them by others. Given an equal income, there is probably no doubt that
a French working-class family will be better fed and better clad than a
corresponding English family dealing in the same market, and will lay
up a larger stock of the household goods, and especially linen, which
are the pride of the French peasant.
The waste resulting from the immoderate use of alcohol and from the
widespread habit of betting, serious as it is, need not detain me, as I
wish to confine myself more particularly to waste which can hardly be
called intentional. It is not suggested that every man should confine
his expenditure to what is strictly necessary to maintain his social
position. The great German writer on finance, Professor Wagner, is
accustomed to say that “parsimony is not a principle.” It is sometimes,
indeed, a bad policy and a wasteful policy; and life would be a very
dull business if its monotony were not relieved by amusement and
variety, even at the occasional expense of thrift. Le Play refers to
tobacco as “the most economical of all recreations.” How else, he asks,
could the Hartz miner “give himself an agreeable sensation” a thousand
times in a year at so low a cost as 10 francs? But nobody would wish to
see a free man using his tobacco like the Russian prisoners described
to me by Prince Krapotkin, as chewing it, drying and smoking it, and
finally snuffing the ashes! Nor should we desire to eradicate from
society the impulses of hospitality, and even of a certain measure of
display. An austere and selfish avarice, if generally diffused, may
strike at the very existence of a nation.
Another respect in which French example may be profitable to us is the
municipal management of funerals (_pompes funébres_). Many a struggling
family of the working classes has been seriously crippled by launching
out into exaggerated expenses at the death of one of its members, and
especially of a bread-winner. The French system, while preserving the
highest respect for the dead, has some respect for the living, who are
frequently unable and unwilling at a time of bereavement to resist any
suggestion for expensive display, which seems to them a last token of
affection as well as a proof of self-respect.
As regards housing the English cottage or artisan’s house is regarded
on the Continent rather as a model for imitation than as a subject
for criticism; but the pressure of population upon space in our large
cities, joined with a love of life in the town, may possibly prove
too strong for the individualist’s desire for a house to himself.
If we should be driven to what Mrs. Leonard Courtney has proposed
to call Associated Homes, the _famillistère_ founded by M. Godin at
Guise, and rooted in the idea of Fourier’s _phalanstère_ will show us
what has already been achieved in this direction. Dissociated from
industrial enterprise it might easily become popular in England. Some
of its collective economies are certainly deserving of imitation, and
the experience not only of the Continent, but also of America, may
soon bring us face to face with the question whether the preparation
of dinners, in large towns, should not--at least for the working
classes--be left to the outside specialist like the old-home industries
of baking and brewing. An excellent example of scientific observation
is ‘Les Maisons types,’ by M. de Foville, the well-known master of the
French Mint. He describes in detail the various forms of huts, cottages
and houses scattered over France in such a fashion that it is said the
traveler in a railway train may tell, by reading the book, through
what part of the country he is passing; and he gives the reasons,
founded upon history or local circumstances, for the peculiarities in
architecture to be observed. The book is a useful warning against rash
generalizations as to the best type of house for a working man.
A well-informed writer shows, in a recent article in the ‘Times,’
that not less than about fifty million gallons of water a day might
be saved in London, “without withdrawing a drop from any legitimate
purpose, public or private, including the watering of plants.” He says:
“The detection of waste is carried out by means of meters placed on
the mains, which record automatically the quantity of water passing
hour by hour throughout the day and night. The whole area served by a
given water supply is mapped out into small districts, each of which
is controlled by one of these detective meters. The chart traced by
the apparatus shows precisely how much water is used in each of the
twenty-four hours. It records in a graphic form and with singular
fidelity the daily life of the people. It shows when they get up in the
morning, when they go to bed at night, when they wash the tea-things,
the children and the clothes; it shows in a suburban district when
the head of the household comes from the city and starts watering his
flowers; it shows when the watering-cart goes round; but, above all, it
shows when the water is running away to waste, and how much.”
I quote this not to multiply examples of the waste of wealth, but to
illustrate the insight which a few figures, such as those recorded by
this meter, give us into the lives of the people. How much more does
the account-book, a detective meter of every economic action, give us
an animated photograph of the family life. Nothing is so calculated to
stimulate social sympathy or to suggest questions for consideration.
Like a doctor’s notes of his patients the facts are not for publication
in any form which will reveal the identity of the subject; but when we
have enough of them they will be of the highest scientific value. We
have at present too few to offer any useful generalizations. All that
can be done is to serve as a finger-post to point the road along which
there is work to be done.
If nothing has been said about the waste and extravagance of the
wealthier classes, it is because economy is with them of less moment.
They suffer little or no privation from extravagance, and derive less
advantage from checking it than those to whom every little is a help.
And so far as much of this waste is concerned, they sin against the
light. It is one thing to point out a more excellent way to the unwary,
another to preach to those who, seeing the better, follow the worse.
But the expenditure of the working classes is also, from a scientific
point of view, vastly more important. Their expenses are more uniform,
less disturbed by fantasy, or hospitality, or expensive travel, and
will give us more insight into the hitherto inscrutable laws of demand.
The time is far removed when any reduction in the cost of living could
be successfully made the pretext for a reduction in the rate of wages.
The Committee on the Aged Deserving Poor recommends under certain
conditions pensions varying with the ‘cost of living in the locality.’
The same factor, we are told, enters into the adjustment of postmen’s
wages as between town and town. How are we to know the comparative cost
of living without these details of expenditure? How else can we measure
with any exactness the progress of civilization itself? How else can
we discover the cohesive force of the family in holding together the
structure of society, the mutual succor of young and old, the strong
and the infirm or sick, the well-to-do and the victim of accident or
ill-luck? To what department soever of economic life we turn our eyes
we find live men and women, born into families, living in families,
their social happiness and efficiency largely dependent on their family
lives, and when we consider how greatly our knowledge and insight into
society will be increased by a more intimate acquaintance with the
economics of the family, we may well cherish the highest hopes for the
future progress of our science. The theory of this subject, at any
rate, is not ‘complete.’ It has not even been begun.
Upon certain aspects of the spending or using of wealth as opposed
to the getting of wealth, like the expenditure of central and local
governments, it would hardly be proper for me to enlarge. The first is
subject to the watchful control of the tax-payer, of Parliament, and
of a highly trained civil service; the second to the jealous criticism
of the rate-payer and his representative. But there is some social
expenditure, like the scandalous multiplication of advertisements
(which by a refinement of cruelty gives us no rest night or day),
which is wicked to a degree. In all these matters of the consumption
of wealth, individually and collectively, we are as yet, it must be
again repeated, too ignorant of the facts. An unimaginative people as
we are, we are fortunately fond enough of travel to have suggestions
constantly forced upon us by the different experiences and habits of
foreign countries. And we are happy in a neighbor like France, with
her literary and social charms and graces, her scientific lucidity
and inventiveness, and the contrasts of her social genius to inspire
comparisons, and in many respects to set us examples. I have singled
out one of her many writers for attention, precisely because of this
quality of suggestiveness. Other investigators have, of course,
attacked the subject. In Belgium and Switzerland, Germany, Italy and
Austria, and the United States, governments and individuals have
recently undertaken the preparation of family budgets; but in many
respects Le Play’s monographs are the first and greatest of all. They
yield excellent material, upon which science, in its various branches,
has yet to do work which will benefit mankind in general; and promises
especially to benefit the people of this country. The cosmopolitan
attitude of the older economists was largely due to their centering
their attention upon the problems of exchange. To them the globe was
peopled by men like ourselves, producing the fruits of the earth,
anxious to exchange them to the greatest mutual advantage, but hindered
from doing so by the perversity of national governments. The facts
of consumption, at any rate, are local. They are often determined by
geology, geography, climate and occupation; and, however fully we may
admit the economic solidarity of the world, and the advantage which one
part of it derives from the prosperity of another, yet we may be easily
forgiven for thinking that our first duty lies to our own brethren;
that our natural work is that which lies at our own doors; that, as
the old proverb says, ‘the skin is nearer than the shirt.’ And we may
fairly be excused if we attempt to make our contribution to the welfare
of the human family through the improvement of the consumption of
wealth and the condition of the people in our own land.