Professor Leone Levi reckoned the number of working-class families as 5,600,000, and their total income L470,000,000 in the year 1884.[2] If we now divide the larger money, minus L650,000,000, among a number of families proportionate to the increase of the population, viz. 6,900,000, we shall find that the average yearly income of a working-class family comes to about L94, or a weekly earnings of about 36s.  This figure is of necessity a speculative one, and is probably in excess of the actual average income of a working family.

This, then, we may regard as the first halting-place in our inquiry.  But in looking at the average money income of a wage-earning family, there are several further considerations which vitally affect the measurement of the pressure of poverty.

First, there is the fact, that out of an estimated population of some 42,000,000, only 12,000,000, or about three out of every ten persons in the richest country of Europe, belong to a class which is able to live in decent comfort, free from the pressing cares of a close economy.  The other seven are of necessity confined to a standard of life little, if at all, above the line of bare necessaries.

Secondly, the careful figures collected by these statisticians show that the national income equally divided throughout the community would yield an average income, per family, of about L182 per annum.  A comparison of this sum with the average working-class income of L94, brings home the extent of inequality in the distribution of the national income.  While it indicates that any approximation towards equality of incomes would not bring affluence, at anyrate on the present scale of national productivity, it serves also to refute the frequent assertions that poverty is unavoidable because Great Britain is not rich enough to furnish a comfortable livelihood for everyone.

Sec. 2.  Gradations of Working-class Incomes.—­But though it is true that an income of 36s. a week for an ordinary family leaves but a small margin for “superfluities,” it will be evident that if every family possessed this sum, we should have little of the worst evils of poverty.  If we would understand the extent of the disease, we must seek it in the inequality of incomes among the labouring classes themselves.  No family need be reduced to suffering on 36s. a week.  But unfortunately the differences of income among the working-classes are proportionately nearly as great as among the well-to-do classes.  It is not merely the difference between the wages of skilled and unskilled labour; the 50s. per week of the high-class engineer, or typographer, and the 1s. 2d. per diem of the sandwich-man, or the difference between the wages of men and women workers.  There is a more important cause of difference than these.  When the average income of a working family is named, it must not be supposed that this represents the wage of the father of the family alone.  Each family