TRANSACTIONS OF SECTION F. 691 



producers and damage foreign producers. Even if some of the imported commo- 

 dities could not be produced at all at home, substitutes, more or less efficient 

 could be produced and give all the more employment. Having acquired some' 

 notion of the advantages of co-operation and the territorial division of labour, the 

 consumers would regard this as a rednctio ad abswdum, and after thinking a 

 little further they would soon see that, after all, there is another set of producers, 

 actual or potential, within the country who will gain — namely, the producers, 

 present or future, who will supply the articles which are to go abroad in exchange 

 for the new import. They will see that what they are asked to do is not to main- 

 tain the amount of national production, but merely to prevent a change in its 

 character which will be accompanied by an increase in its amount. 



Take another example of Chinese obstructiveness to desirable change. As 

 great cities grow, it becomes convenient that their centres should be devoted to 

 offices, warehouses, and shops, and that people who work in these places and 

 still more their families, should hve in the outskirts. I do not know that anyone 

 has denied this. Certainly the great majority are willing to admit it. At one 

 time it is believed that a quarter of a million people lived in the square mile com- 

 prised within the City of London ; no one supposes that would be convenient now. 

 There is no reason to suppose that further change in the same direction will not 

 be desirable m the future. Yet, incredible as it will appear to future generations 

 public opmion, the House of Commons, the London County Council, and some 

 town councils think, or at any rate act as if they thought, that the process has 

 now gone far enough and ought to be stopped ; as if the state of things reached 

 about the year 1891 was to be permanent, to last for ever and ever. Private 

 owners are indeed still allowed to pull down dwelling-houses and erect shops and 

 offices, but they are abused for doing so, and their liberty is at least threatened. 

 But if a new railway or a new street is made— in all probability with the inten- 

 tion of increasing the accessibility of the centre from the suburbs— if even a new 

 London Board School is built, and houses inhabited by persons who have less 

 than a certain income are pulled down in any of these processes, it is required 

 by law or parliamentary resolution that other houses for these people must 

 be built m the neighbourhood. So it comes about that there are in quarters 

 of London most unsuitable for the purpose enormous and repulsive barrack 

 dwellings, the sites of which are devoted in secula seculorum to the housing 

 of the working classes ; while the immense cost of devoting them to this instead 

 of to their proper purpose is debited to the cost of improving the facilities for 

 locomotion or to education, and is defrayed principally by the"" rates on Loudon 

 property, which chiefly consists of houses, and to some extent by the higher 

 charges on the railways consequent on the restriction of facilities for extension 

 Fifty pounds a head is the average loss involved to the rates of London on everv 

 man, woman, and child for whom these dwellings are provided. Such is the 

 wisdom of practical men uninformed by instruction in economic theorv. 



This palpable absurdity could never have been pei-petrated if "the general 

 working of the economic organisation had been understood. In that case it 

 would have been seen at once that the extrusion of over 200,000 inhabitants 

 from the City of London in the past, which is admitted to have been desirable 

 was effected by the quiet operation of the laws of value. It would have been 

 seen that as it became desirable to turn the City to other purposes, the ground 

 in the City became too valuable to use as bedrooms and as living-rooms for 

 mothers and children, and this increase of value drove out the 200,000 inhabit- 

 ants. It would have been seen that the change had not come to an end and 

 no responsible body would have dreamt of putting themselves in opposition to it 

 by buying sites and writing them down to 2 per cent, of their actual value in 

 order that they might be tied up for ever and ever to be the homes of a certain 

 number of persons with less than a certain income. If some unusually dense 

 individual who had failed after many attempts to pass his examination in 

 economic theory had proposed the policy which has been adopted, he would 

 have been asked two questions : first, ' What peculiar sanctity is there about the 

 position occupied in the closing yeai's of the nineteenth century .» Why should 



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