TRANSACTIONS OF SECTION T. 777 



reading take the place of doubt and difficulty ; and what is now an irksome task 

 to both teacher and pupil would become a delightlul pastime. 



Our present stjie of writing is ' cumbersome in the last degi'ee, and unworthy 

 of these days of invention.' By the use of phonetic shorthand the time spent in 

 writing is reduced to one-fourth, and the writing is as legible as longhand. On a 

 very moderate computation there are a million persons out of the hundred millions 

 who speak the English language that occupy, on an average, one hour a day in 

 writing, or three hundred hours in the working days of a year. This amounts 

 to three hundred million hours in the course of a year. Three-fourths, or say 

 one-third, of this time would be saved by the use of shorthand. Reckoning 

 twelve hours as a working day, above twenty-seven thousand years are annually 

 lost to the world by our slow and tedious method of writing. 



The phonetic alphabet for teaching reading and the shorthand alphabet were 

 then exhibited. 



WJSBNESBAY, SEPTEMBER 12. 



The following Papers were read : — 



1. The Malthusian Theonj. Bij Edwin Chadwick, G.B. 



When Malthus wrote Lis book on the ' Pressure of Population on the Means of 

 Subsistence,' the population of England was ten millions, and in the manufacturing 

 districts the wages were low, and the prices of provisions were high. Take Lanca- 

 shire : the wages given at the commencement of the cotton manufactures were not 

 more than five shillings per head of the cotton mill workers, man, woman, and child ; 

 that is to say, if there were three workers in a cottage, the aggregate wages they 

 received were not more than fifteen sliillings per week. In agriculture, in Scot- 

 land, Adam Smith states that the wages for adult workers at that period were 

 eightpence a day. The wages now in Lancashire average seventeen shillings per 

 head of the mill workers, and in a cottage of three — man, woman, and child — the 

 w-ages may amount to 21. 10s. per week. The agricultural wages in the highly 

 cultivated districts in Scotland are now about \l. per week for the man, Gs. for the 

 woman, and 4s. for the boy, besides a good cottage and other advantages. Now it 

 may be stated as an economical principle, that the fact of an artisan being em- 

 ployed at wages denotes that over and above his own means of subsistence, he 

 earns enough to yield a profit to the capitalist who employs him, and the continued 

 advance of wages denotes a continued diminution of the pressure of that population 

 on the means of subsistence. And this has been going on, as in Lancashire, with 

 the increasing introduction of labour-saving machinery. 



At the beginning of the century, the spinning of a pound of cotton cost Is. ; it 

 now costs ^d., and there is now paid the highest amount of wages with the 

 lowest cost of production of any in Europe. The population in Lancashire has 

 increased from half a million to three millions and a half, and it is going on in- 

 creasing ; whilst the death rate has been considerably reduced. A Cabinet 

 minister is reported to have stated in a recent speech : ' The vast questions con- 

 nected with population have to be considered. It is growing at a rate which I do 

 not like to cite, but you know Professor Huxley's estimate. Are we taking 

 measures to deal with that population in an intelligent and far-sighted way ? 1 

 venture to think that we are taking very few precautious, if any. And when you 

 come to think what that question of population involves, you must see that it is 

 one which will force itself on our attention in a very unmistakable way before 

 long. In the first place, it forces on us the great question of the land of this 

 country, which remains limited, while the population knows no limit to expansion.' 

 This quietly assumes the limited cost of production, and the limited amount of the 

 production. Sir Robert Kane, in his work on the ' Industrial Resources of Ire- 

 land,' declares that the cultivable land of that country is capable of a threefold 



