Ag 
F.—ECONOMIC SCIENCE AND STATISTICS. iy 
failed completely to clear up the confusion, and it dominates the mind 
of the lay public even now—much, I admit, to the discredit of the 
economists, who should have taught that public better. 
While there are no statistics on the subject worth much, and none 
covering any considerable area either of place or time, past history is 
sufficiently known to assure us. that increasing civilisation has, in fact, 
made the aggregate share of property grow faster than that of labour, 
the obvious cause of this being that useful things constituting property 
have grown faster than population, and so much faster that what decline 
of the rate of interest has taken place has not been sufficient to counteract 
the tendency. The most primitive people had scarcely any tools, and 
their buildings, if any, could be erected in a few hours. Ownership 
certainly did not then give a claim to about one-third of the whole income, 
as statistics suggest that it does in modern Western countries. 
There is nothing to show that this tendency will be either reversed or 
intensified by a cessation of the growth of population. The cessation 
will, of course, tend to reduce the desirability of additional equipment ; 
a large part of the additions of the past have been required simply to 
enable the additional people to be provided with tools, houses, and other 
instruments of production or enjoyment. But additions to equipment 
will be made with less sacrifice of immediate enjoyable income than before, 
so that the increase of quantity may be sufficient to counteract the decline 
in the value of the units. Moreover, it is quite impossible to say what the 
tendency of invention may be in the future—whether to enhance or to 
diminish the value of additional material equipment. 
But the history of the last hundred years suggests that this question of 
the division of income between property and labour is losing whatever 
importance it possessed. The economists and socialists of a hundred years 
ago were little removed from the time when it was common to talk of 
‘the labouring poor,’ as if society was pretty sharply divided into poor 
workers on the one side and rich owners of property on the other. There 
were, indeed, some members of the propertied classes who were poor, but 
they were offshoots of the wealthier families rather than members of the 
proletariat with a little property. How innocent the mass of the people 
were of the crime of owning anything you may realise if you recollect 
that none of the agencies with which we are familiar for enabling them 
to invest had then got beyond the embryo stage. Friendly societies, 
co-operative societies, building societies, savings banks, are all modern 
growths. Before their advent a worker could, of course, become.a small 
master—never, I think, a small mistress—and from a small master grow 
to be a big master, but if, for any reason this was not open to him, what 
could he do with savings, supposing he was able to make any? Put 
them in a stocking, or the thatch, or under the garden soil, and if they 
happily escaped accident there, and accumulated sufficiently, give them 
to an attorney of doubtful honesty to be lent out on mortgage. Iremember 
only about fifty years ago being told by a booking-clerk at a moorland 
station, about a hundred miles from London, how two old women had 
recently paid for return tickets to London in threepenny-bits, and by a 
solicitor that an old man from the same district had just brought him for 
investment on mortgage a large sum in gold which he had so far been 
