$24 ON THE PURCHASING POWER OF WAGES. 



I know no person whose friendship I valued more than that 

 of Mill. I greatly respected his candour ; I admired his trans- 

 lucent utterances. No man ever gave one a clearer conception 

 of what he meant at the moment. He was so earnest and so 

 convinced, so gentle and so modest, that for a time one felt 

 sure that he must be right. But few writers I am sure have 

 been so much in the wrong, and few writers have done so 

 much mischief as he has. The evil came from want of know- 

 ledge. His estimate of economical causes was entirely auto- 

 biographical. He mistook his own impressions of the social 

 state for the causes which had brought them about. He 

 believed, for he told me so, and he never said what he did not 

 believe, that every moral gift and every intellectual power 

 could be imparted by education. The beggary, the misery, 

 the improvidence, the recklessness of the English labourer 

 were in his mind due to immediately preventible causes. 

 Had he studied economical history, and given their due weight 

 to that vast series of causes which made the English peasant 

 what he is, I am convinced that his indignation would have 

 been directed against other agencies than those which he 

 collected and criticised. But unfortunately, he wrote on social 

 conditions without a preparatory training, even in those facts 

 which had been published. 



Even under the most favourable circumstances, of an urgent 

 demand for labour and of labour organised into partnerships 

 which watch for and give effect to their opportunities, it is 

 exceedingly hard for the wage-earning classes to make head 

 against a rise in prices, and to secure for themselves their 

 share in the upward movement. And when, as in the seven- 

 teenth century, prices had been on an average near sevenfold l 

 what they had been at little more than a century earlier, it 

 would have required the most strenuous efforts on the part 

 of labourers to keep their earnings up, and impossible to make 

 them attain their old level. But not only were their funds 



1 Wheat from 126010 1542, 5.5-. i\\d. a quarter; in the seventeenth century, 



