118 SECTIONAL ADDRESSES. 
keeping in the thatch of his cottage. All this is now changed, and when 
property, as a whole, and not merely the large property-owners, 1s attacked, 
the great investing agencies of the ‘ working classes’ become formidable 
opponents and are supported by the small direct investors who have been 
helped by them. 
And while many of the working-class have become property owners, 
many of the propertied class have become the paid servants of public 
companies and other institutions, so that the old sharp distinction between 
the wage-earner and the capitalist is become a thing of the past, and the 
division of income between property and labour is no longer a division 
between two classes composed of different individuals, but a division 
between two sources of income largely possessed by the same individuals. 
Thus, in Distribution, emphasis on the old categories of land, capital, 
and labour is rapidly becoming obsolete and is being replaced by emphasis 
on individual riches and poverty, however arising. No longer do we 
think of relieving poverty by improving the terms of the general bargain 
which theory conceives labour as making with capital; we are much 
more likely to meet with arguments that individual poverty is being 
caused by this general bargain being too much in favour of the wage- 
earners. It is no longer the lowness of standard earnings that worries 
the philanthropic economist, but the fact that so many people are unable 
to rank themselves among recipients of those wages. Emphasis is on 
unemployment. 
Unemployment is not really a very modern phenomenon. The crowds 
of beggars who collected their daily dole in the Middle Ages from the 
monasteries and from private wayfarers and householders were, perhaps, 
as large a proportion of the population as the normal registered unemployed 
of to-day. The ‘ distresses’ of the period just preceding a hundred years 
ago seem to have been accompanied by enormous unemployment, but 
we have no reliable statistics, and the loose statements, such as that in 
Birmingham in 1817 one-third of the workpeople were wholly unemployed 
and all the rest on half-time, do not help us much. But so far as I know, 
it has never been contended that history shows unemployment to be 
greater when population (or even population of working age) is rapidly 
increasing. 
Yet it is common to talk of ‘ the difficulty of providing employment 
for a rapidly increasing population,’ and some eminent authorities quite 
recently endeavoured to console the public by, alleging that the coming 
decline in the growth of numbers will greatly alleviate the present situation 
in regard to unemployment. 
I believe this to be a profound error, based on an elementary mis- 
conception of the origin of demand. The old proverb ‘ With every mouth 
God sends a pair of hands’ is true and valuable, but no more so than its 
converse, ‘ With every pair of hands God sends a mouth.’ The demand 
for the products of industry is not something outside and independent of 
the amount of products. The demand for each product depends on the 
supply of products offered in exchange for it, and the demand for all 
products depends on the supply of all products. Consequently, there is 
not the slightest danger of the working population ever becoming too 
great for the demand for its products taken as a whole. 
