8 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



time, have increased very nearly 100 per cent.* It is also con- 

 ceded of this increase in Great Britain, that by far the largest 

 proportion has occurred within the later years of this period, 

 and has been concurrent with the larger introduction and use 

 of machinery. Thus the investigations of Sir James Caird 

 show that the advance in the average rate of wages for agricult- 

 ural labor in England in the twenty-eight years between 1850 

 and 1878 was 45 per cent greater than the entire advance that 

 took place in the eighty years next preceding 1850. 



Mr. Giffen has also called attention to an exceedingly inter- 

 esting and encouraging feature which has attended the recent 

 improvement in money-wages in Great Britain — and which 

 probably finds correspondence in other countries ; and that is, 

 that the tendency of the economic changes of the last fifty years 

 has been not merely to augment the wages of the lowest class of 

 labor, but also to reduce in a marked degree the proportion of this 

 description of labor to the total mass — " its numbers having 

 diminished on account of openings for labor in other directions. 

 But this diminution has at the same time gone along with a 

 steady improvement in the condition of the most unskilled labor- 

 ers themselves." So that, if there had been no increase what- 

 ever in the average money-wages of Great Britain in recent 

 years, the improvement in the general condition of the masses 

 in that country " must have been enormous, for the simple rea- 

 son that the population at the higher rate of wages has increased 

 disproportionately to the others." But all this is only another 

 way of proving that machinery always saves or minimizes the 

 lowest and crudest kinds of labor. One of the most interesting 

 and unquestionably one of the most accurate investigations re- 

 specting the change in wages since 1850, in the leading indus- 

 tries of Great Britain, was made in 1883 by Mr. George Lord, 

 President of the Manchester (England) Chamber of Commerce. 

 The results showed that the percentage increase in the average 

 wages paid in eleven of the leading industries of that city be- 

 tween 1850 and 1883 was 40 per cent; the increase ranging 

 from 10"30 per cent in mechanical engineering (fitters and turn- 

 ers) to 7472 per cent in the case of other mechanics and in me- 

 dium cotton spinning and weaving. In the United States, ac- 

 cording to the data afforded by the census returns for 1850 and 

 1880, the average wages paid for the whole country increased 



* This statement was first made by Mr. Giffen in 1883, in his inaugural address as 

 President of the Royal Statistical Society of England, and was received with something 

 of popular incredulity. But recurring to the same subject in another communication to 

 the same society in 1886, Mr. Giffen asserts that further investigations show that there 

 is no justification whatever for any doubts that may have been entertained as to the cor- 

 rectness of his assertions. 



