This wonderful table may speak for itself. It is an obvious criticism that many of the articles are also articles of home production, so that the increase does not show the real increase of the consumption of the whole population per head. Assuming a stationary production at home, the increased consumption per head can not be so much as is here stated for the imported article only. There are other articles, however, such as rice, tea, sugar, coffee, tobacco, spirits, wine, and malt, which are either wholly imported, or where we have the excisable figures as well, and they all—with the one exception of coffee—tell a clear tale. The increase in tea and sugar appears especially significant, the consumption per head now being four times in round figures what it was forty years ago. There could be no better evidence of diffused material well-being among the masses. The articles are not such that the increased consumption by the rich could have made much difference. It is the consumption emphatically of the mass which is here in question.
As regards the articles imported, which are also articles of home production, it has, moreover, to be noted that in several of them, bacon and hams, cheese and butter, the increase is practically from nothing to a very respectable figure. The import of bacon and hams alone is itself nearly equal to the estimated consumption among the working-classes fifty years ago, who consumed no other meat.
The only other figures I shall mention are those relating to education, pauperism, crime, and savings-banks. But I need not detain you here. The figures are so well known that I must almost apologize for repeating them. I only insert them to round off the statement.
As to education, we have practically only figures going back thirty years. In 1851, in England, the children in average attendance at schools aided by parliamentary grants numbered 239,000, and in Scotland 32,000; in 1881 the figures were 2,863,000 and 410,000. If anything is to be allowed at all in favor of parliamentary grants as raising the character of education, such a change of numbers is most significant. The children of the masses are, in fact, now obtaining a good education all round, while fifty years ago the masses had either no education at all or a comparatively poor one. Dropping statistics for the moment, I should like to give my own testimony to an observed fact of social life—that there is nothing so striking or so satisfactory to those who can carry their memories back nearly forty years, as to observe the superiority of the education of the masses at the present time to what it was then. I suppose the most advanced common education forty or fifty years ago was in Scotland, but the superiority of the common-school system there at the present day to what it was forty years ago is immense. If Scotland has gained so much, what must it have been in England where there was no national system fifty years ago at all? Thus at the present day not only do we get all children into schools, or nearly all, but the education for the increased
