are seven, and in almost all places before they are nine or ten."[1] The mortality of children under five is still very great, but it is not half of Adam Smith's highest estimate, and the mortality between five and ten is not so great as that of ordinary adults.
Not only have sanitary conditions been improved, but labour has been regulated with the best possible results. The horrors of the factory system have been mitigated or removed by the legislation Lord Shaftesbury initiated; and the increasing power of Trades-Unions is making the revival of overwork on a large scale impossible. Compulsory education is assisting to keep children from that toil in stifling rooms which used to be the fruitful cause of stunted frames and impaired vitality. Some occupations that w r ere poisonous have now been made reasonably safe. A certain proportion of the workers in large towns—such as dock labourers, coalheavers, workers in foundries, and men in the building trade—work under conditions that are favourable to muscular development as well as to health, and are in a great many cases better fed than they would be in the country. Mr. Booth's very careful analysis of the population in some of the poorest parts of London has shown that only a fraction are paupers or loafers, and that not quite 20 per cent are casual or intermittent wage-earners.[2] It is probably correct to say that even in London, the typical instance of concentration, the poverty is still manageable, though now and again, in hard times, many thousands of men and women willing to
- ↑ It is already found necessary to pick the members of the London Police Force chiefly from men born in the country. The following statistics were obtained by Mr. Llewellyn Jones in 1888:—
London born, 2910. Country born, 11,606.
—Hobson's Problems of Poverty, p. 56. - ↑ Statistical Journal, vol. 1. pp. 326-391, and vol. xli. pp. 276-331.
