ABSTRACT

I NE QUALITY in the distribution of wealth has been afeature of human society from the earliest times, but atsome periods the inequality is more marked than at others. In general, the more primitive the arts of production and the simpler the economic organization of society, the less pronounced is the disparity between individuals in the enjoyment of the means of comfort. In the very first stage of economic activity, when man gained a precarious livelihood by hunting and fishing, society was organized on an equalitarian basis. There were no social classes, and (from the economic standpoint) even the differentiation between the sexes was slight. As occurs among the lower animals, the female hunted alongside the male in the hunting pack. But since then, every improvement in the means of satisfying human wants has tended to accentuate individual and class differences. Increasing differentiation and specialization have broken up the uniformity of primitive society, and men have become ranked in social classes, corresponding to varieties in economic function or to differences in the public services which they render to the community. Every upward movement of economic progress has been accompanied by greater social inequality, and the human race has paid for its increase in material comfort by a certain weakening of the social sympathies. The Industrial Revolution is no exception to this general law. It was, as we have indicated, a movement with both good and evil sides. It made a few rich, but it made many poor. It increased national wealth, but it diminished national wellbeing. It promoted material prosperity, but it arrested social progress. The Industrial Revolution threw into bolder relief the problem of poverty by creating almost for the first time a class of landless and propertyless proletarians. The industrial worker of the nineteenth century was a wage-earner, completely divorced from the means of production and relying for a livelihood entirely on the labour of his hands. He was not, it is true, an entirely new figure. As far back as the

sixteenth century examples of the type were to be found, but at these earlier periods the proletarians were too few in number to impress a definite character on the social organization. It was only in the nineteenth century that they became a powerful social class, large enough to embrace nearly all the working population. The creation of a rural and industrial proletariat is the most important social consequence of the Industrial Revolution, and, it may be added, the most unfortunate.