Nelson Evening Mail SATURDAY, APRIL 3, 1926 A CENTURY OF PROGRESS

Nelson Evening Mail, Volume LXI, 3 April 1926, Page 6

Nelson Evening Mail SATURDAY, APRIL 3, 1926 A CENTURY OF PROGRESS

NO mere stimulating book lias como from the press for many a year than Mr .Jos, pb McCabe's “1825-1925: A Century if St 111 it minus Progress.’’ Widely and deeply read in history, sociology and ;I inline, endowed with a keenly analytical mind and 'laving the gift of putting evirvihing he has to say in simple, clear r.'.d diieei language, the author of this la' (,!; is i '.act! v fitted to deal with his : nhjei t Mr McCabe has been a student.

all bis !iv and. it is safe to say. wdl : nut iniu l to be one till tbe end of it, But lie m not one to hoard up bis knowledge; jo- < a ll oe<t keep it to himself. Ipu ards ui .a'veiitv books and two or three dozen translations amply testify to bis desire to share with his fellows the hard-earn-ed products of the burning of the midnight oil. Rut. to leave 'bo man and get to the i.oot . Tie- objec t for wbieli it- WilS written aas to give clear, precise and ample preot of two very important.

statements. Ibe first is that fheie has in the ins! one hundred years been more progress in every respect- than bad ever before been witnessed in five hundred, if not a thousand years." The seioud is that seieme bns been overwhelmingly responsible for such stupendous progress. These are direct and positive statements and time is but one way to prove i|,:-,'i. li is to compare, as revealed by literurv, otlieial and journalistic docu ments. the social, intellectual and moral level of life a hundred years ago with i |uii of to-day. It is a laborious method lint it is the only reliable one and we shall see that by its aid Mr McCabe proves Ids theses with unanswerable force. The inquiry is confined to GreatBritain for tlm obvious reason that there is uo other F.nglish-speakng country whirl: lias not. during the century, re , eiv .M enormous arrcssioiis ot population from without : an old land with a- fairly stable populaion could alone give comparable results. No one ean )or a moment deny that Ho. wealth, both public arid private, of the United Kingdom has enormously increase,! since 1826. The inveterate pessimist. however, confronted with this fail, replies that the rich are richer and the poor are poorer. It is a strange perversion of the truth. The distribution of wealth is still far from ideal but i( is simply a matter of fact that the mass of the people arc far heller off than they were a hundred years ago; there has been very definite progress. It is not proposed to go into the array of facts and figures which Mr McCabe brings forwaid—readers of his hook can do that for themselves —but the situation may bp summed up in the paradox that the unemployed worker of to-dav is bettor off—hotter fed. better clothed, better housed —than the employed worker of a century ago. fo ci insider wages alone is. of course, a verv misleading method of estimating the condition of the wage receiver. A parliamentary paper of 1824 gives the highest wages of the agricultural worker as twelve shillings a week, without food m housing, and at that time workers on the land constituted more than onefouitli of the entire labour army of Britain. But the cost of living has to come ii to the question; and more than that, the sort of life that there was to live. In ilu- first place, the labourer who earned twelve shillings a week—the average was two or throe shillings less—worked sixteen hours a day for it. He lived in a !mvc!. His staple food was bread, cheese and potatoes. Beef and mutton, lie never tasted: a little bacon twice or thrice a month was all the flesh-food he got.f Butter. sugar, jams, eggs and milk he hardly knew the flavour of; tea, with the cheapest kind costing eight shillings a pound, was out of the question. Recreations there were none: sports, theatres, music did not- come into his life. So much for the adult worker but ii has to be renumbered that the child was also a toiler. "From the age of seven onward at least three-fourths of tbe children of Britain worked twelve hours a dnv.”

Thai stark fact needs no supplement. The average duration of life- was about thirty years; today it is over fifty. That also ran stand without comment. Naturally. Mr McCabe devotes a- large portion of his book to showing the amelioration in the condito-n of the workers during the century ; progress which left the mass of a nation still in the same state would he no progress. Hut improvements which have affected the conditions of life for all classes come in for striking illustration. Two or three instances unis; here suffice. Trains began to run in 1825 but for long after flint, tbev did not. count as a means of transport. Coaches were the usual means of travelling, for those wealthy enough to pay tin- fare. The general rate of speed can he imagined when it is stated that 46 hours between l.ondon. and Edinburgh was looked upon as a record to be proud of. As to postal communication—again a luxury of the well-to-do—it, may be dismissed with the observation that the London Chronicle of 1824 {ells with great admiration Hint a letter had come from the Pacific Islands to Scotland via New Vork 'in the incredibly short space of four months 1 A cable would send the message and get a reply now within as many hours. Hut these are material tilings. What of moral improvement, which, after all. is that which matters most. Vice and • rune, nur author says, was appallingly rampant in Engined a century ago. As an illustration take this. “In 1825 in England and Wales 14.437 persons were < 01111101 ("d lor trial (in a population of 13 million;-') • in 1920 (the last available year I the number was 9130 (in a population of 37 mil lions). “A Century ol Stupendous Progress’’ is an optimistic hook. Imt it is an opti■nisii, based 011 farts and figures, an opti:iii..in justified by liistorv.