true relations of church and state in Italy-who most profoundly appreciated, in some of the most serious problems which this age has inherited from the past, the solvent power of lawreverencing liberty. In the spring of 1873, in a parliamentary crisis which, at the time, seemed to jeopardize the government and possibly the monarchy, Ricasoli rose in his place and, applying his principles to the one issue then before them the question of the monastic corporations in Rome lifted the whole subject to such an elevated plane of justice and generosity and faith in law and liberty, that he commanded the support of the better elements of every party and carried all before him. The King drove to his villa the next day to thank him; and the far-seeing statesman had a foretaste then of that future in whose coming he often expressed, in private, an unwavering confidence, when church and state should be co-ordinated only by a mutual trust, -when the church should find its best secular guarantees in the righteous laws of a Christian state, and the state its noblest inspiration in the patriotism and righteous influence of a Christian church. WM. CHAUNCY LANGDON, BOOTH'S EAST LONDON.1 HIS is by far the most important English contribution to economics The two books have much in common; both illustrate the new interest that is beginning to show itself in the direct study of the actual facts of social life. They differ, indeed, in method. Toynbee's work was the first attempt in England to trace the historical origin of existing conditions, while the aim of Mr. Booth's book is to obtain, by laborious inquiry, a more accurate description than was previously possessed of the conditions themselves. But the historical method and the method of observation which from the biological sciences is now passing over into the sociological- are closely allied. Those who pursue them agree in the expectation that from the sequence and coexistence of facts something will be learned of their causal relations. The first volume of Life and Labour of the People is a most admirable performance. There have been earlier essays in a similar direction, e.g. the reports of Mr. Leoni Levi; but none of them has been on anything like the same scale, and none has established conclusions of anything like the same solidity and completeness. Mr. Booth has furnished us, not so much with a collection of facts to support this or that theory, as with a great positive addition to our knowledge, far transcending in importance most abstract argumentation. The book is divided into three parts: "The Classes," "The Trades" and "Special Subjects." Of these the first, by Mr. Booth himself, is by far the most striking. The London school board employs in East London sixty-six " visitors," or attendance officers, who call at every house and draw up lists of children of school age. Each of the visitors has but a few streets under his care; and as most of them have been employed in the same district for several years, they have acquired very complete information as to the condition of the people. From the lips of these officials, Mr. Booth and his secretaries took down a description of almost every house and its inhabitants, a task whose magnitude we realize when we are told that it dealt with a population of 900,000, living in 3400 streets, and that it occupied the greater part of two years. The data -- 1 Life and Labour of the People. Vol. I: East London. Edited by Charles Booth. Contributors: Charles Booth, Beatrice Potter, David F. Schloss, Ernest Aves, Stephen N. Fox, Jesse Argyle, Clara E. Collet and H. Llewellyn Smith. London, Williams & Norgate, 1889.-598 pp. With a colored map. thus obtained, being corrected and supplemented from other sources, serve as the basis for a division of the population into eight classes, which may be presented as follows: A. 11,000. 14 per cent of the population. Lowest class of occasional laborers, loafers and semi-criminals. This class, though it receives accessions from all the others, is largely hereditary in its character. It is not scattered uniformly over the whole area, but is found in a number of more or less isolated settlements. B. 100,000. 114 per cent. The very poor, with casual earnings. This class is composed chiefly of casual laborers. The adult men, about 24,000 in number, of whom as many as 6000 are sometimes employed at the docks (p. 190), "do not on the average get as much as three days' work a week." C. 75,000. 8 per cent. 204,000. 221⁄2 per cent. The poor, with weekly D. 129,000. 141⁄2 per cent. incomes of 18s. to 21s. c. Maintained on intermittent earnings, and composed of laborers whose work is necessarily intermittent, with a large contingent from the poorer artisans, the street sellers and the smaller shopkeepers. D. Maintained on fairly regular earnings, and composed chiefly of laborers in permanent employment. E. 377,000. 42 per cent. Regular standard earnings of from 235. to 30s. weekly. This includes the more prosperous laborers, a large proportion of the artisans, the best class of street sellers and general dealers, a large proportion of the small shopkeepers, the best-off among the home manufacturers and some of the small employers. F. 121,000. 131⁄2 per cent. Upper working class, earning above 30s. weekly. This includes foremen over laborers and the more comfortable among the artisans, together with a number of small employers. G. 34,000. 4 per cent nearly. Lower middle class. Shopkeepers and small employers, clerks and subordinate professional men. H. 45,000. 5 per cent. Upper middle class. The servant-keeping class. But of these more than two-thirds are to be found in Hackney, the more genteel northern part of East London. There seems no reason to doubt the substantial accuracy of these figures, and it would be difficult to exaggerate their significance. Perhaps the conclusion most surprising to the general public is the very small number, comparatively, of the loafing and semi-criminal class. "The hordes of barbarians of whom we have heard, who, issuing from their slums, will one day overwhelm modern civilization, do not exist. There are barbarians, but they are a handful, a small and decreasing percentage, a disgrace but not a danger" (p. 39). Two other conclusions, more cheering than might have been anticipated, are that over 55 per cent of the working population belong to families receiving each more than 21s. a week, and that about 70 per cent can count upon steady employment I cannot help thinking, however, that, in reaction from the usual melodramatic presentation of East London life, Mr. Booth has commented upon his statistical results in a tone somewhat too optimistic. To say, for instance, of the 200,000 "poor," that "they are neither ill-nourished nor ill-clad, according to any standard that can reasonably be used" (p. 131), is probably to create a more comfortable impression in the minds of Mr. Booth's readers than the author wishes to convey. "Poverty " Mr. Booth defines as an average weekly income of from " 18s. to 21s. for a moderate family" (p. 33). But it is noticeable that in the table of household expenditure (p. 138) on which Mr. Booth bases his remarks as to standard of comfort, the average weekly income ascribed to classes C and D is 23s. 6d. Half a crown a week makes a considerable difference. But even with the additional half-crown, a family must needs be very small to secure adequate food and clothing together with fuel and houseroom in London. Mr. Booth's opinion in this matter may usefully be compared with the estimates of Mrs. Barnett in Practicable Socialism (1888). There is another way in which Mr. Booth has unintentionally supplied a sedative to the troubled consciences of some of his readers, and that is by his language in reference to class B: "It is doubtful if many of them could or would work full time for long together if they had the opportunity . . . The ideal of such persons is to work when they like and play when they like; these it is who are rightly called the 'leisure class amongst the poor" (p. 45). It is not surprising that people are beginning to say: "The distress of the very poor is their own fault. Mr. Booth has proved that they don't want to work." But surely this is to disregard the fact that such moral qualities as shiftlessness and idleness are themselves to a large extent not ultimate facts, but the product of circumstances. It is indeed a defect running through the whole book now before us, that it confines itself too narrowly to the individualist point of view; it describes the condition of the individual and the consequences which flow from it, without attempting to penetrate any further. So in this case. In every class there are doubtless many who fall to a lower social position from sheer incapacity or laziness, and there is nothing more to be said. Of such, class B is doubtless to a large extent composed. But the faults of the class as a whole are certainly in part the result of the character of modern industry. Take for instance the docks, and what is true of the docks is true mutatis mutandis of several employments of unskilled labor: "Twenty years ago a man could be sure of fairly regular employment, say for ten months out of the twelve, and for nine to ten hours a day, and was accustomed to earn on an average 20s. to 25s. a week." Then came the introduction of steam navigation and the ever-increasing rapidity of commercial operations; and the sons of the regularly employed men of 1869 became the incompetent loafers of 1889 as directly as if the companies had designed it. This mental result of material conditions is recognized by Miss Potter in her paper on the docks: "The casual by misfortune tends to become the casual by inclination. The victims of irregular trade and of employment given without reference to character are slowly but surely transformed into the sinners of East-end society" (p. 201). It is a pity that such considerations as these are not put forward more prominently in Mr. Booth's description of the classes. Part II, "The Trades," is made up of six chapters on the chief branches of employment, together with a chapter on "Women's Work." Each is the result of careful investigation, and one or two spring from personal experience. No such thorough and systematic studies of industrial conditions have ever before been made in England, and they deserve the most careful attention. I must however limit myself in this place to a brief account of their contents. The first, Miss Potter's chapter on "The Docks," is written in a more popular style than the rest, but is also less complete. It gives a clear enough picture of the conditions of labor before the great strike; but it dwells too much on the surface. Without suspecting it, Miss Potter gives us only one view of the situation, that of the dock officials, from whom her information was obtained. According to this view, affairs were in a hopeless impasse, and nobody in particular was to blame for anything: the "uncontrolled competition of metropolitan industry" led London shipowners and merchants to play off docks and wharves against one another, while at the same time the volume of business at the port of London was decreasing. As to diminishing the irregularity of employment, the chief evil, so far as the dockers were concerned, — that was impossible. Had it been possible it would have been attempted: "I think we may rest assured that if a practical plan were suggested by which this might be effected, the employer would be the first to take advantage of it; for the loss entailed by the bad work of the casual is a fact unpleasantly realized in the balance sheet" (p. 205). This simply means that by the continuance of the system of casual employment the directors thought that they got their labor more cheaply, and certainly saved themselves a good deal of trouble; but they did not at all realize that their action was immoral. Before many months had 1 The London Times, August 29, 1889, p. 8: a summary of the evidence before the House of Lords Sweating Committee. |