434 STUDIES, SCIENTIFIC AND SOCIAL chap. 



possibly have anticipated ; yet its chief social effect has 

 been the increase of luxury and the widening of the gulf 

 between rich and poor. Although material wealth, 

 reckoned not in money but in things, has increased per- 

 haps twenty or thirty fold in the last century, while the 

 population has little more than doubled, yet millions of 

 our people still live in the most wretched penury, the 

 whole vast increase of wealth having gone to increase the 

 luxury and waste of the rich and the comfort of the 

 middle classes. 



Campanelli, more for-sighted than Bacon, saw the need 

 of social justice as well as increased knowledge, and pro- 

 posed a system of refined communism. But all these 

 ideas were but as dreams of a golden age, and had no 

 influence whatever in ameliorating the condition of the 

 workers, which, with minor fluctuations, and having due 

 regard to the progress of material civilization, may be said 

 to have remained practically unchanged for the last three 

 centuries. When one-fourth of all the deaths in London 

 occur in workhouses and hospitals notwithstanding that 

 four millions are spent there annually in public charity, 

 •while untold thousands die in their wretched cellars and 

 attics from the direct or indirect eff'ects of starvation, cold, 

 and unhealthy surroundings ; and while all these terrible 

 facts are repeated proportionately in all our great manu- 

 facturing towns, it is simply impossible that, within 

 the time I have mentioned, the condition of the workers 

 as a whole can have been much, if any, worse than it is 

 now. 



At the end of the seventeenth, and during the 

 eighteenth century, a new school of reformers arose, of 

 whom Locke, Rousseau, and Turgot were representatives. 

 They saw the necessity of a fundamental justice, especially 

 as regards land, the source of all wealth. Locke declared 

 that labour gave the only just title to land ; while 

 Rousseau was the author of the maxim, that the produce 

 of the land belongs to all men, the land itself to no one. 

 The first Englishman, however, who saw clearly the vast 

 importance of the land question, and who laid down those 

 principles with regard to it which are now becoming 



