438 STUDIES, SCIENTIFIC AND SOCIAL 



tools and appliances available in the last century. But 

 even in the last century, not only was there produced a 

 sufficiency of food, clothing, and houses for all workers, 

 but an enormous surplus, which was appropriated by the 

 landlords and other capitalists for their own consump- 

 tion, while large numbers, then as now, were unprofitably 

 employed in ministering to the luxury of the rich, or 

 wastefully and wickedly employed in destroying life and 

 property in civil or foreign wars. 



Taking first the anti-capitalistic or social legislation, we 

 find that, though the horrible destruction of the health, 

 the happiness, and the very lives of factory children has 

 been largely reduced, there has grown up in our great 

 cities a system of child-labour as cruel and destructive, if 

 not quite so extensive. Infants of four years and upwards 

 are employed at matchbox-making and similar employ- 

 ments to assist in supporting the family. A widow and 

 two children, working all day and much of the night, can 

 only earn a shilling or eighteenpence from which to pay 

 rent and support life. Children of school age have thus 

 often to work till midnight after having had five hours' 

 schooling ; and till quite recently a poor mother in this 

 state of penury was fined if she did not send the children 

 to school and pay a penny daily for each, meaning so much 

 less bread for herself or for the children. Of course for 

 the children this is physical and mental destruction. The 

 number of women thus struggling for a most miserable 

 living often a mere prolonged starvation is certainly 

 greater than at any previous period of our history, and 

 even if the proportion of the population thus employed 

 is somewhat less and this is doubtful the fact that the 

 actual mass of human misery and degradation of this 

 kind is absolutely greater, is a horrible result of a century's 

 remedial legislation, together with an increase of national 

 wealth altogether unprecedented. 



Again, if we turn to the amount of poverty and pauper- 

 ism as a measure of the success of remedial legislation 

 combined with a vast extension of private and systema- 

 tised charity, we shall have cause for still more serious 

 reflection. In 1888 the Registrar-General called atten- 



