CHAP. XX. 



THE DEMON OF GREED. 349 



for the press, and most politicians, go on declaring that 

 pauperism is decreasing, because, by more strict rules, 

 out-relief is reduced or refused altogether; while the bet- 

 ter class of the suffering poor prefer starvation or suicide 

 to breaking up their home, however miserable, and 

 enduring the servitude and prison-like monotony of the 

 workhouse. 



Suicides have indeed increased most alarmingly, from 

 1347 in 1861 to 2796 in 1895. This is for England 

 and Wales; and the increase in proportion to the popu- 

 lation has been from 67 per million to 92 per million. 

 An examination of the records of inquests show that 

 either absolute want or the dread of want is a very fre- 

 quent cause; and as the other evidence just adduced 

 indicates the continuous increase of want, while the ever- 

 increasing struggle in all forms of trade leads to the con- 

 tinual discharge of men and women who from illness or 

 old age are unable to do the same amount of work as the 

 younger and more healthy, the two sets of facts are seen 

 to be connected as cause and effect. If, however, pov- 

 erty and unmerited want were decreasing, and the poor 

 were, decade by decade, becoming better off, then the 

 large and continuous increase, -for more than thirty 

 years, of deaths by suicide and in public charitable in- 

 stitutions, during the very same time that private charity 

 in varied forms had increased at an altogether unprece- 

 dented rate, becomes altogether inexplicable. If pov- 

 erty had been decreasing, then we should expect the 

 enormously increased and widespread sphere of public 

 charity to have easily overtaken the severer forms of dis- 

 tress; to have reduced the deaths in the workhouse and 

 asylum; to have diminished suicide from the dread of 



