mentation of wealth and power," then it has remained relatively just as poor. If the extremes of poverty have not lessened, they have increased, because the extremes of wealth have. As to the cheapening of the means of subsistence, the official statistics, e.g., the accounts of the London Orphan Asylum, show an increase in price of 20% for the average of the three years 1860-1862, compared with 1851-1853. In the following three years, 1863-1865, there was a progressive rise in the price of meat, butter, milk, sugar, salt, coals, and a number of other necessary means of subsistence.[1] Gladstone's next Budget speech of April 7th, 1864, is a Pindaric dithyrambus on the advance of surplus-value-making and the happiness of the people tempered by "poverty." He speaks of masses "on the border" of pauperism, of branches of trade in which "wages have not increased," and finally sums up the happiness of the working class in the words: "human life is but, in nine cases out of ten, a struggle for existence."[2] Professor Fawcett, not bound like Gladstone by official considerations, declares roundly: "I do not, of course, deny that money wages have been augmented by this increase of capital (in the last ten years), but this apparent advantage is to a great extent lost, because many of the necessaries of life are becoming dearer" (he believes because of the fall in value of the precious metals) . . . . "the rich grow rapidly richer, whilst there is no perceptible advance in the comfort enjoyed by the indus-
- ↑ See the official accounts in the Blue Book: "Miscellaneous statistics of the United Kingdom," Part vi., London, 1866, pp. 260-278, passim. Instead of the statistics of orphan asylums, &c., the declamations of the ministerial journals in recommending dowries for the Royal children might also serve. The greater dearness of the means of subsistence is never forgotten there.
- ↑ Gladstone, House of Commons, 7th April, 1864.—"The Hansard version runs: "Again, and yet more at large—what is human life, but, in the majority of cases, a struggle for existence." The continual crying contradictions in Gladstone's Budget speeches of 1863 and 1864 were characterised by an English writer by the following quotation from Molière:
"Voilà l'homme en effet. Il va du blanc au noir,
Il condamne an matin ses sentiments du soir.
Importun à tout antre, à soi-même incommode,
Il change à tout moment d'esprit comme de mode."(The Theory of Exchanges, &c., London, 1864, p. 185.)
