in price. Milk, eggs, butter, coal and rent were all higher in price at the end than at the middle of the last century." On the other hand we may fairly urge that comforts and luxuries, such as tea, sugar, tobacco and meat, not to mention necessaries such as—bread, also entered largely into the economy of the workers.
When we find that during a half-century in which the population had increased rapidly, the average money wages of the workers had grown by more than three-quarters, while the average price of the goods they consumed showed a by no means negligible decline, we see what little basis there is for what Marx and other people have called the "iron law of wages," an entirely imaginary law, which is alleged to force the rate of wages always down to the level of subsistence. If there had been any real truth in this law, it would have been clearly impossible for wages to rise by 78 per cent. with a rapid increase in the number of wage-earners, while at the same time the average price of consumable goods had fallen by 11 per cent. Under the circumstances, and in view of his own figures, it is surprising to find Mr. Snowden saying on a later page (120) that
