In the same way the unemployed London labourer will be an acquisition to a country where there is plenty of room for him, his wife, two children, and infirm father. Yet they can be spared from Whitechapel by the employed labourer who lives on the next floor, and by the ratepayers of that parish who will have so many fewer loaves, so much less meat and coal to provide weekly from the day the party step on board the emigrant steamer. Charitable organizers have pretended the man is out of work because he is an idle vagabond, but their confutation is easy, for were the assertion true it would follow that the men who are employed cannot do the work that must be done, and in that case wages would be rising week after week, employers would be refusing orders. Yet the Trades Unions have these twenty years past chiefly occupied themselves in devising means of shortening the workman's daily task in order to distribute fairly the aggregate of work, which does not (relatively) increase, between ever increasing numbers of men. The practical minds who control these Unions know that there is not enough for everybody; they know, too, that if "a fair day's work" were done there must be many more in the ranks of the unemployed than can be counted now. In spite of their artificial devices, well understood and ably seconded by those they lead, to raise or maintain at a respectable level the payment for a given task, it is impossible to provide every one with steady regular employment. This can be obtained now in very few trades, certainly not by the labourer. An average of from four to five days per week all the year round is the rule. The enlightened employer feels this is disadvantageous to his class, since idleness demoralizes and repeated failures take the spirit out of the working man—whose interests do not really conflict with those of the employing class.
Had we approximately ascertained the normal value of the sum of British production in every kind, demonstration would be easy that under actual social exigencies, real or artificial, it has ceased to bear reasonable proportion to the population, which stood at twenty-two millions in 1855 and at thirty millions in 1881.
Unfortunately, sound data are not forthcoming, the authorities differ. Our principal source of production being the land, the total agricultural annual yield of the United Kingdom has, by eminent writers, been valued at six hundred million pounds sterling, and at three hundred: at = £17 per head, and at =
