Empire and the Crimean War. Nevertheless, the increase in production under this head, while materially contributing to support our people, has scarcely added to our available wealth. Much of it can be accounted for by the needs in respect of housing, warming, and clothing the additional eight millions of human beings. Growing luxury diffused through all classes accounts for more of it Expenditure of a sort unknown in former times when locomotion was difficult, dear, and people stayed at home, spending comparatively nothing upon a slow and costly press, accounts for a good deal more. Undoubtedly part of all this extra production is useful and necessary under the circumstances, but my aim is to make it plain that very little of it added to national wealth; most of it having been consumed forthwith.
An enormous rise in "values" of real and leasehold property, while apparently creating numerous great, perhaps fragile fortunes, has not in reality added to the sum of absolute wealth, and, obviously, this increment is not "production," since its effect has been merely to transfer, to promote circulation if you will. This increment of value is not a creation, is not intrinsic, is accidental, often fictitious, always precarious. Much of the rise in cost of what has been constructed within the free trade period is readily traceable to waste, and represents so much lost not gained. Thus you build a house that your father could have built for £1,000, at a cost of £1,500; and the tenant's income is accordingly diminished by £25 at least for the necessary additional rent. The £500 have been absorbed in higher wages to the workmen who built the house, and who found themselves forced to insist on being better paid than were their predecessors, because the spirit of the age imbued them with desires that could only be gratified by expenditure. If a labourer in Rotherhithe be paid six shillings per diem for discharging timber cargoes, instead of four shillings, for the reason that he is accustomed to spend two shillings more than need be, the timber must be charged so much more to the consumer.
The man who makes two stalks of wheat grow in place of one, adds to production and wealth, while his neighbour who finds two applicants for the empty house where there used to be one, and is thus able to exact twice the former rent for it, adds nothing. The latter impoverishes one family, or at any rate takes from them what they will if possible take from somebody else, and if he spends the acquired increment of rent by
