PRESIDENT’S ADDRESS. 883 
the larger proportion of breadwinners upon the land. It is the 
country which relatively places the smallest number of hands on 
the land for the production of food and raw products which has 
also attained the highest stage of progress, and secures for each 
breadwinner the largest purchasing power, and, therefore, the 
largest amount of satisfactions. I deny, therefore, most emphati- 
cally that whatever distress in the United Kingdom still exists 
would be lessened by any scheme which would place more hands 
on the land than its economic conditions demand for the production 
of food and raw products. 
Tt would be an economic blunder, producing a waste of human 
effort, and so increasing tenfold the miseries it proposes to remove. 
If two men were set on the land to do all the work necessary 
which one properly equipped labourer can accomplish, it would at 
one stroke reduce the productive power over real utilities (for to 
produce more than is reasonably wanted of any good thing would 
not be a utility) by about 31 per cent., and a corresponding 
decrease of the average purchasing power of the labourer. 
Provision for the present distress of the pauper and unemployed 
at most only diminishes the purchasing power of breadwinners by 
24 per cent. Noble as are the ideals of the better class of 
ae writers, Tam, nevertheless, convinced that the selfishness 
of landlordism or capitalist is not the cause of our miseries, and 
that placing more people on the land than the economic conditions 
of the particular country requires would, instead of removing the 
present evils, increase them tenfold. The misery caused by loss 
of health, death of the breadwinner, idleness, improvidence and 
vice, cannot be removed by opening the land by any increase of 
facilities. The congestion of labour, so called, in crowded centres 
is not due to such a cause at all. It is entirely due to the lack 
of knowledge how to allocate the bread-winner each day added to 
the population in accordance with the exact division of labour in 
which fresh services are required. 
The broad proportions which at present are required within a 
complete circle of exchange of services are as follows :—A gricul- 
tural and pastoral services, 52:5 per cent. ; industrial services, 
30:1 per cent. ; domestic, 6°8 per cent. ; commercial services, 5°2 
per cent. ; professional and undefined services, 5-4 per cent. ; 
total, 100 per cent. 
These proportions vary with the economic conditions of the 
locality, and with every change in the modes of production caused 
by improvements in machinery or the introduction of new auxiliary 
forces. But whatever local proportions may be requisite, it is 
true that congestion of labour and consequent distress are nearly 
all due to unconscious transgression of the law which determines 
divisions of labour to be in exact accord with the nature and 
proportion of products or satisfactions in common demand. 
