154 SECTIONAL ADDRESSES. 
All these special influences favour capital against labour. It is in 
accord with them that, of all our economic indices, that which shows 
worst, the only one that shows no progress at all from 1900 to 1910, is 
real wages, the reward to labour; that which almost alone shows con- 
tinued progress at the full Victorian rate is exports, to be explained 
perhaps in large measure as the surplus profits of capital. 
With these points in mind, we reach an economic interpretation of 
the Edwardian age, reasonable in itself and consistent with other than 
economic records. That age does not live in our memories and will 
not live in drama and fiction * as a season of hard living and hard labour. 
It comes back to us now rather in the guise of the ball before Waterloo, 
as an episode of unexampled spending and luxury; as the time when we 
saw our roads beset by motors, our countryside by golfers, our football 
grounds by hundred thousand crowds and a new industry of book- 
makers, our ballrooms and dining-rooms by every form of extravagance. 
The smooth development of Victorian days was broken, but the charac- 
teristic of the time was rather inequality of fortune than general mis- 
fortune; discontent rather than poverty; a gain by capital in relation to 
labour, by profits in relation to wages, by some classes of workmen at 
the expense of others, even more than a check to our progress as a 
nation. Some check to our national progress there probably was, but 
we are not bound to believe that the check was permanent. The three 
factors described above—the earthquake wave of labour supply, the 
South African War, and the upward turn of prices—are all peculiar to 
their time. The relative shortage of capital would tend io produce its 
own corrective. Difficulty in absorbing an abnormal flood of new 
labour does not prove permanent over-population; if all the hundred 
million persons who now find room and growing opportunities in the 
United States had landed there at once they would all have starved.° 
In the last three years before the War we find in nearly all indices 
resumption of a rapid upward movement. What would have happened 
if the War had not come? Would the Edwardian age have proved a 
passing episode of unrest or the beginning of a serious threat to our 
prosperity? This is one of many questions whose answer is buried 
in the common grave of war. 
In the third place, even if ‘the new century was to see in 
Britain a lasting and not a transient harshening of conditions, if the 
rich ease of the Victorian age had gone for ever with Victoria, 
there is little ground for surprise. Malthus or no Malthus, it 
was not reasonable to expect Britain to keep up for ever the speed 
that marked her start in the industrial race. | Providence had not 
concentrated in these islands the coal and iron supplies of all the 
world. As the United States and Germany and France developed their 
own mineral resources, Britain was destined to find her general indus- 
trial supremacy challenged, now in one field now in another; she 
would be driven to discover and maintain those branches of work in 
8 Sonia, by Stephen McK ; -Bun . G. Wells; 
pe aknold Be cKenna; Z'ono-Bungay, By H. G. Wells; The Regent, 
® This is pointed out by a recent author, Mr. H. Wright, in Population 
p- 110 ( ‘ Cambridge Economic Handbooks,’ 1923). "a ? f 
