this is compensated for by a cottage with a boarded floor (though he can be turned out of it at any time), and doles in the winter, and who flourish the "hardships" of the French peasant at him, to scare him from attempting to regain the common lands.
The unequal distribution of money and the unequal distribution of population both contribute to increase poverty. That country should be accounted the richest, in which wealth is most equally distributed—that is, in which there is the smallest proportion of paupers. The destruction of small holdings, and of common land, has had a most powerful influence on the unequal distribution of population. Everything has long conspired, and still conspires, to drive the people into the towns. Thus has arisen that vast, unmanageable mass of "casual" labour, which hangs on the skirts of regular labour, and pulls it down.
The class which suffers most from the unequal distribution of population is the class of "unskilled" labour. Not that any labour can be wholly unskilled—every kind of work can be done well or ill. "Unskilled" labour, however, chiefly demands physical strength, and in overcrowded towns physical strength deteriorates, until we get the deplorable processions of the "Unemployable." And it would be good for us to remember that, after all, "unskilled" labour is lightly esteemed only because it is plentiful. It is the sort of labour without which the life and trade of a nation could not go on for a single day. If a State were compelled to abolish half its trades, "skilled" labour would go first, and the more skilled before the less skilled. The more highly skilled any labour is, the more possible it is to dispense with it.
There must be something profoundly amiss when the richest country in the world has been for nearly four centuries complaining that it has so many poor. But if we counted only ten instead of thirty-two and a half millions in England and Wales, there would be pauperism if the land were in the hands of a few and if those few set themselves to keep rural districts thinly populated.
In 1841, when one person in every eleven was a pauper, England and Wales counted under ten million inhabitants Now, the proportion is about one in every thirty-three This is disgraceful enough, but it shows that pauperism may
