818 REPORT—1899. 
Wealth, after all, is a means to anend. It is not enough to maximise wealth, 
we must strive to maximise utilities. And we can no more judge of the condition 
of a people from its receipts alone, than we can judge of the financial condition of a 
nation from a mere statement of its reyenues. 
The condition of the people has, of course, improved, and is improving. 
Public hygiene has made great progress, and houses are better and more sanitary, 
though for this and other reasons rents have risen, Wages are higher. Commo- 
dities are cheaper. Co-operation and the better organisation of retail business, 
giving no credit, have saved some of the profits of middlemen for the benefit of 
the consumer, while authority fights without ceasing against frauds in weights 
and measures, and adulteration. Free libraries, museums, picture galleries, parks, 
public gardens and promenades have multiplied, and it is almost sufficient to 
observe that no one seems to be too poor to command the use ofa bicycle. But 
with all this progress it is to be feared that housekeeping is no better understood 
than it was two centuries ago—perhaps even not so well. In the interval it has 
become enormously simplified. The complete housewife is no ionger a brewer, a 
baker, a dyer, a tailor, and a host of other specialists rolled into one. But among the 
working classes the advent of the factory system has increased the employment of 
women and girls away from home to such an extent that many of them now marry 
with a minimum of domestic experience, and are with the best intentions the 
innocent agents of inefficiency and waste, even in this simplified household. 
If we were suddenly swallowed up by the ocean, it appears probable that the 
foreign student would find it easier to describe from existing documents the life and 
home of the British craftsman in the middle ages than of his descendant of to-day. 
In part, no doubt, our fiscal system, with its few taxes upon articles of food and its 
light pressure on the working classes, is responsible for this neglect. During the Napo- 
leonic war Pitt sent for Arthur Young to ask him what were the ordinary and neces- 
sary expenses of a workman’s family, and the question would again become one of 
practical politics if any large addition were required in the proceeds of indirect taxa- 
tion. Taxation has the one advantage of providing us with statistics. We know 
tolerably well the facts in the mass about the consumption of tea and coffee, dried 
fruits and tobacco, and of alcohol, while the income tax (aided in the near future 
by returns of the death duties) may give us some idea of the stratification of the 
wealthier classes. But the details of consumption are still obscure. It has 
already been suggested that some restraint may arise from the sentiment that 
individuals are likely to resent what they may regard as a prying into their affairs. 
But when we travel abroad we are curious to notice, and do notice without giving 
offence, the dress, the habits, and the food of peasants and workmen; and it is 
difficult to resist the conclusion that we are less observant at home because these 
common and trivial details appear to us unworthy of attention. In his ‘ Principles 
of Economics’ Professor Marshall says: ‘ Perhaps 100,000,000/. annually are 
spent even by the working classes, and 400,000,000/. by the rest of the population 
of England, in ways that do little or nothing towards making life nobler or truly 
happier.’ And, again, speaking before the Royal Statistical Society in 1893: 
‘Something like the whole imperial revenue, say 100 millions a year, might be 
saved if a sufficient number of able women went about the country and induced 
the other women to manage their households as they did themselves.’ These 
figures show, at any rate, the possibilities of greatness in the economic progress 
which may result from attention to the humblest details of domestic life. 
Economics, like other sciences, lies under a great debt of obligation to French 
pioneers. The Physiocrats, or économistes, of the eighteenth century were the first 
school of writers to make it worthy of the name of a science. In Cournot France 
gave us a giant of originality in pure theory. In Comte we have a philosopher 
truitful in suggestion to the narrower economist. In Le Play we have a writer as 
yet little known in England, but to whom recognition and respect are gradually 
coming for his early perception of the importance of ascertaining the facts of con- 
sumption, and itis to Le Play’s ‘family budgets,’ the receipts and expenses of 
