as well as the 5,000 of the aristocracy. I think you will admit that Mr. Walter Wren and others, who assert that "whilst the working men of England were the creators of national wealth, the hereditary aristocracy were the squanderers and wasters of it," go too far, and have allowed their prejudices to blind or warp their judgment. Mr. George writes as if the increase in the national income from £515,000,000 in 1843 to £1,200,000,000 in 1880, had all gone to the landlords, and to the large landlords. But the figures prove that the aristocracy do not take more than fifty millions annually, and the other hundred millions goes to the smaller landlords; and it can be proved that it is this class, and not the aristocracy, who have gained the greatest benefit from the increased value of land in or near to the large towns as the commerce of the country has developed.

I blame Mr. Chamberlain and his school more than any enthusiast like Mr. George. Mr. Chamberlain insinuates that the incomes of the landlords in the course of our recent progress have increased, proportionately, far faster than the incomes of business men and of shareholders, and that the latter, as time goes on, are becoming more and more dwarfed by the former. Now to all this, as Professor Leone Levi has shown, there is an exceedingly simple answer, and that answer is a reference to certain exceedingly simple statistics. Seventy years ago, of the incomes of the richer classes, the landlords took considerably more than half. Thirty-six years later, they took little more than a third; and at the present moment they take something less than a quarter. In 1864, for every pound that was taken