T.—ECONOMICS. 1538 
In the second place, even if we admit, as I, for one, am prepared 
to admit, that there was some real change in our conditions, some 
faltering in our progress in the first years of this century, it may yet 
be no more than a transient phenomenon, a result of special causes not 
pointing to permanent change. At the turn of the century we do in fact 
find special and temporary influences disturbing our ordinary develop- 
ment. One of these is the South African War; that war, like other 
wars, probably caused a greater loss of savings than of human life; it 
would leave capital scarce relatively to labour and in a stronger position 
to bargain. Another is the change in the movement of prices. Just 
before 1900 the falling tide of prices turned. From 1900 to 1913 we 
lived on a rising tide. This also is an element favouring capital as 
against labour, profits rather than wages. Yet another special influence 
at the turn of the century is a change in the rate of labour supply, due 
partly to the course of birth- and death-rates more than twenty years 
before and partly to the development of compulsory education. This 
point calls for explanation. 
In 1876 the birth-rate in this country reached its maximum. At 
the same time, or just before, important steps were taken for the 
improvement of public health; the death-rate, which had changed little 
for thirty years, began to fall, and fell steadily thereafter. There 
followed a quarter of a century later, as a wave follows a distant earth- 
quake, an abnormal growth in the supply of adult labour. As has 
been pointed out by Mr. Yule, the number of males aged twenty to filty- 
five rose 19 per cent. from 1891 to 1901, as compared with a rise of 
14 per cent. from 1881 to 1891, and 10 per cent. in earlier decades.’ 
If we take five-year averages the rate of natural increase (difference of 
birth- and death-rates) reached its highest points in the years 1876-1880 
and 1881-1885. Normally, this would have shown itself first by large 
numbers of boys entering the labour market in the early ‘nineties. At 
the same time, however, the Education Acts were withdrawing more 
and more boys under fourteen into the schools. The State dammed 
up the rising flow of juvenile labour for a year or two. The main 
pressure in the labour market began to be felt later, i.e. about 
1900, and presented itself as the ‘ problem of boy labour,” which was 
really the problem of those who had got boys’ work easily enough 
between fourteen and twenty (replacing the younger children kept at 
school), but found themselves in difficulties when they reached man’s 
estate. This abnormal movement was bound, for the time at least, to 
disturb the balance between the growth of capital needed to employ 
labour and the growth of labour seeking employment. Some temporary 
pressure in the labour market was inevitable. It might cause a check 
in economic progress as measured per head of the total population; it 
would certainly, in the bargaining between labour and capital for the 
division of their joint product, make labour for the moment relatively 
weak and capital for the moment relatively strong because scarce. 
Wages would lose relatively to profits. 
7 See Mr. Yule’s paper on ‘ Changes in the Birth and Marriage Rates’ in 
the Journal of the Royal Statistical Society, March 1906. 
