Wages, to some extent, will no doubt rise also, but as competition seriously affects the markets for manufactured goods and machinery, and the increase of population not only tends to raise prices of commodities, but also restricts the rise of wages, relief will have to be found in economies of various sorts. The standard of comfort in working families must improve considerably; partly because the demand for improvement, taking the shape of industrial combination and trade-unionism developed to a high degree, will be more and more clamorous; partly because of public feeling. What is currently called the growth of sentimentalism in modern life is really the development of modern conscience. No doubt the abolition of judicial torture was at one time regarded as a mark of absurd sentimentality; and the opinion has already been expressed that a vast amelioration of public morality is in store for the new age. A great element in the conflict between comfort on the one hand and competition on the other will be economy of means. That is why the new age will, among other things, be an age of economy.
In the matter of food, chiefly, a great saving can be effected. Nothing is more painfully ludicrous—I use the incongruous collocution advisedly—than the spectacle every winter of money being laboriously accumulated for the
