There is another side to the medal, and not so fair a one. The
necessaries of life are cheaper; wages are actually higher, when the
greater value of money is taken into account; more care is taken as
to the housing of the poor; the workers of the nation have more
leisure, and spend not a little of it in travelling, being now by far
the most numerous patrons of the railway; the altered style of the
conveyances provided for them is a sufficient testimony to their
higher importance. All this is to the good; so, too, is the
diminution in losses by bankruptcy and in general pauperism, the
increasing thrift shown by the records of savings banks, the
lengthening of life, the falling off in crime, which is actually--not
proportionally--rarer than ten years ago, to go no further back.
Against this we have to set the facts that the terrible malady of
insanity is distinctly on the increase--whether due to mere physical
causes, to the high pressure at which modern society lives, or to the
prevalent scepticisms which leave many wretched men so little
tranquillising hope or faith, who shall say?--that all trades and
professions are more or less overcrowded; and that there is a
terrible amount, not of pauperism, but of hard-struggling poverty,
massed up in the crowded, wretched, but high-priced tenements of
great towns, and maintaining a forlorn life by such incessant, cruel
labour as is not exacted from convicted criminals in any English
prison.
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