VI] LONDON WORKERS, SECULARISTS, ETC. 8i 



of the corn-laws. Perhaps the most glaring and the most 

 numerous of these errors are due to Sir Robert Giffen, who, 

 being considered an official statistical authority, continues to 

 be quoted to the present day as if his statements were to be 

 absolutely relied on. More often quoted than any other of 

 his writings is his " Progress of the Working Classes in the 

 last Half Century," given as a Presidential Address to the 

 Statistical Society in 1883, and issued as a pamphlet, price 

 threepence, in 1884, at the request of several friends, including 

 Mr. Gladstone, who styled it a masterly paper." It would 

 occupy a whole chapter to expose the errors and the fallacies 

 that pervade this paper, and I must therefore confine myself 

 to two points only, that of the rise of wages and of the food 

 of skilled artisans. 



Mr. Giffen gives the weekly wages of carpenters at Man- 

 chester as 24s. fifty years ago and 34^. in 1883, an increase of 

 42 per cent, but he omits to give prices for London. In the 

 Report of the Industrial Remuneration Conference, Mr. J. G. 

 Hutchinson gives the wages at Greenwich in 1832 as 32^. 6d., 

 and in 1876 as 39^". Sd, a rise of only 22 per cent. Again, 

 Mrs. Ellis, a Huddersfield pattern-weaver, told the conference 

 that Mr. Giffen's statements in the same table, of the earnings 

 of her fellow-workers, were grossly inaccurate. He gave 

 them as 2$s. a week against i6s. fifty years earlier, whereas 

 they were only earning an average of 20s. in 1883. The 

 wages where my brother worked were 30J. a week for all the 

 men employed. We see, therefore, that Mr. Giffen's general 

 statement that wages have risen " in most cases from 50 to 

 100 per cent." is open to the gravest doubt ; while even if it 

 were nearly accurate, it would not by any means prove what 

 he claims — that these workers are verj/ much better off than 

 they were fifty years earlier. He certainly saves himself, 

 verbally, by terming it an "apparent rise," but he never 

 attempts to get at the real rise, and throughout his argument 

 hardly refers to this point again. Yet it is a most important 

 one, on account of the fact which he notices, that, at the date 

 of his paper as now, in all the building trades wages are 

 reckoned and paid by the hour^ instead of by the day as at the 



VOL. I. G 



