encouraging them to make still greater efforts for themselves in the future.[1]
During the same period we had seen great improvements in education and sanitation, the lengthening of human life, the total extinction of the plagues which used to scourge Europe periodically, the practical abolition of certain diseases such as typhus and small-pox; and the general attention to health and the mental improvement of all classes, though it still left very much to be desired, was making progress which was perhaps as rapid as could be expected, owing to the ignorance and conservatism which are the common lot and the pride of most of us.
It may be true that Capitalism has had very little to do directly with these improve-
- ↑ Professor Bowley in an article on "Wages" in the Encyclopædia of Industrialism says (page 514): "It appears certain that nominal and real wages increased from 1850 to 1874, that nominal wages fell and real wages remained steady from 1874 to 1880, that nominal wages remained steady and real wages rose from 1880 to 1887, and that both nominal and real wages rose from 1887 to 1899. . . . By 1910 real wages were back at the level of 1896–1898, but cannot be measured exactly." By real wages the Professor of course means wages as measured in actual buying power, as compared with nominal wages, measured in money alone.
