A CENTURY'S PROGRESS.
IMPROVED LIVING CONDI-
TIONS.
"Whatever may be in store for us during the ensuing hundred years, it ia as sure as to-morrow's sunrise that there will be changes," says Mr and Mrs Sidney Webb in their paper, the New York Statesman.
, "Wlietiher the existing social order is good or bad, the one thing certain t is that it will not endure unaltered. To put it moderately, we have every reason for supposing that the England of the year 2013 will be as different from the England of to-day a>s the England of to-day is from that of 1813. And history teaches m)ore than the fact of movement; it informs us also of the nat are of the changes in the midst of which we are living. It even gives us some indication of the'direction of the movement that is,/ in progress. <
"Viewed in centuries, our nation is certainly on the upgrade. A 'hundred -years ago the condition of the great mass of the people was deplorable in the extreme. W ekno-w of ihardly any evil of to-day that was not, in 1813, relatively more prevalent and more destructive in its injurious results. Labour itself has become to a greater extent intellectnalised ; an ever-dwindling -proportion of the work is the bard and brutalizing; manual toil of the past, more animal than human •, whilst an evergrowing proportion is that of the ma-chine-minder, the electrician, or the motor-driver, at any rate compatible, with civilisation and citizenship. "As a consequence of these changes, the wage-earning class, high and low, has risen in manners and morals, perhaps even more than in means; and it is manners and morals —the capacity for 'team play'—that make social proigrea* possible. In this connection it is important to notice that an enormous and, as we think, a daily growing proportion of the proletariat is transformed. On the one hand, the section ofdnskilled labourers has relatively dwindled. On the other hand a new .secrtion has come .into existence. , "few persons realise adequately the extent to which the'wage-earners of all highly evolved communities have become'a 'black-coated proletariat.' In our own country, of the whole eight-ninths of the total population having incomes under £l6O a year, no fewer than twenty per cent, now fall within this practically new class ctf 'minor professionals,' .who thus number probably one-thirfl a.s many as all the manual wbrking wage earners put together. "Even organisation and science will, however, not avail without a growth of public spirit, a recognition af the social obligation to serve the community, and a willingness to serve in the democratic ranks. The 'change of heart' we think we see happening as we compare the young with the old —happening not so fast as we should like, but still definitely enough for hope. And behind it all there drives an silently the persistent pressure of a people traditionaly- free; aware of its power; clearing its eyes from illusions of the past; becomes steadily more alive to its common interests, and, if we. mistake not, resolved to make Democracy a reality in industry as well as in politics," 1
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Wairarapa Age, Volume XXV, Issue 10713, 9 December 1913, Page 7
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518A CENTURY'S PROGRESS. Wairarapa Age, Volume XXV, Issue 10713, 9 December 1913, Page 7
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