LAND NATIONALIZATION 269 



utilities, while excluding as much as possible all questions of 

 justice or equity, of moral or intellectual advancement. 



The conference lasted three days, with morning and after- 

 noon sittings ; about one hundred and fifty delegates repre- 

 senting the chief labour associations of the kingdom attended ; 

 and twenty representatives of political and social science, 

 including myself, were invited to read papers. These papers, 

 with some valuable statistics in appendices, and a report of 

 the discussions on the chief papers, were published by Cassell 

 and Co. in a thick 8vo volume of over 500 pages, entitled 

 " Industrial Remuneration Conference Report." In the 

 paper which I prepared, I endeavoured to go to the very 

 heart of the question propounded by Mr. Miller, " How to 

 cause Wealth to be more Equally Distributed." It occupies 

 twenty-four pages of the Report, but I give here an abstract 

 of it prepared for the newspapers. 



HOW TO CAUSE WEALTH TO BE MORE EQUALLY 



DISTRIBUTED 



(Abstract.) 



As the bulk of the community live on wages, the only means by which 

 they can obtain a larger proportion of the wealth they produce is by 

 wages becoming generally higher, and by work being more constant ; 

 and in order that this change may be permanent, and be commensurate 

 with the evil to be remedied, it must be brought about, not by any form 

 of charity or of local or individual action, but by social rearrangements 

 which will be selecting and self-sufficing. The fundamental objection 

 often made that a general rise of wages would interfere with our 

 foreign commerce was shown to be unsound, and it has been refuted 

 by Mill, Fawcett, and other political economists. 



The cause of low wages was next discussed, and was shown to be 

 due, not to a superabundance of labourers, but to the fact that the 

 majority of labourers have nothing but daily wages between them- 

 selves and starvation, under which conditions wages are necessarily 

 driven down to the minimum on which life can be supported. This 

 absolute dependence of labourers on daily earnings is at a maximum 

 in great cities where access to land and to natural products is com- 

 pletely cut off, and it is here that these earnings sink to their mini- 

 mum, and at the same time that the wages of highly-skilled labour is 



