52 ECONOMIC THEORY 



have a low one. The accumulation of property by workmen is an 

 influence that retards the growth of numbers, and it is, of course, 

 the higher classes of laborers that are the best able to make such 

 accumulations. Education reduces the rate and the higher classes 

 have the more education. Finally, any prosperity which is long- 

 continued has a tendency to establish a progressive standard of 

 living. Men may even become habituated not merely to living on 

 a certain absolute level, but to living, as the years advance, on a 

 higher and higher level. This is the supreme possible result of an 

 era of prosperity, and if it ever becomes an assured and general 

 result, if men come to require for their personal satisfaction that 

 they shall live in each decade better than they did in the preceding 

 one and shall act accordingly, all danger that they will sacrifice 

 their gains, and, in so far as laboring-men are concerned, turn the 

 course of progress backward, will be forever removed. Gains for 

 labor will be precursors of no offsetting losses, but rather of further 

 gains, and men will hold their improved stations with an ever- 

 increasing firmness of tenure. The culminating result of progress 

 will be its self-perpetuating tendency the law that insures that 

 " to him that hath shall be given." It is the function of the statis- 

 tician to measure quantitatively the influences which make for this 

 ideal consummation and to measure the grand resultant effect of 

 them all. 



Only a study which is profound on the theoretical side and elabo- 

 rate on the statistical side can settle the issue as to whether the 

 favorable conditions are real and how powerfully they act. 1 



1 What Malthus proved is that when a standard of living is fixed, a quick 

 rise of wages above the amount necessary to sustain this standard causes an 

 increase of the birth-rate and a fall reduces it. If the height of the line AB 

 above a base represents the standard of living, and the length of it represents a 



'' 



A '' 1800 1900 



centurjr of time, it may be taken as representing a basis of wages which remains 

 fixed for a hundred years. The dotted line A'B' represents the actual pay of 

 workmen, now rising above the standard and now falling below it. Each time 

 that the pay exceeds its standard the birth-rate is quickened, and each time 



that it falls below it, 

 B the rate is retarded. 

 Now it may be that 

 the permanent average 

 birth-rate is so slow as 

 to permit a steady rise 

 of the standard. There 

 would, in such a case, 

 be the same fluctua- 

 tions of the rate of 

 wages above its stand- 

 ard and the same alternate quickening and retarding of the birth-rate as in the 

 former case; but the steady rise of the standard itself would tend to retard 

 the birth-rate and so to perpetuate its own upward movement. 



