In ancient times fighting was considered a kind of labour, the highest kind. The Service of the King was the most honourable, save that of the Service of the Church. Fighting and praying were alike paid in land, or in coin, and the land or the coin could be inherited by those who neither fought nor prayed. Hard-working traders and farmers also earned coin and land, and sometimes left their gains to idle children. Hence owners have not always been earners. Some writers on National Economy have inveighed against the principle of inheritance. To me it seems natural and right that what a man has produced by labour, he may leave to his descendants, at least, when he does so by old Saxon Law. There has been much virulent denunciation of Landlords, especially in relation to the _unearned increment of property_ in thriving towns. I do not know any however, who have discussed a question, that bears much upon the Argument of this book. =The Unrecorded Increment of Woman’s Labour.=—Earners are not always owners. Except where a woman brought some fortune at her marriage it has been supposed that her husband “supported her.” But in the majority of respectable middle-class or workmen’s dwellings, this is very far from being the case. The woman labours as well as her husband. If property is the result of labour, both can be expressed in figures. Let us take a man earning 30s. a week for eight hours’ work a day, and five hours on Saturday, forty-five in all. The payment for each hour is 8d. As the woman spends no time walking to and from her work; as she has no rest on Saturdays or Sundays except through extra work on other days; as she on these other days works very many more hours than her husband, she has bettered the common stock by the amount of ninety hours of work; which taken at half the wage, rises to the same sum, so that the common income should be reckoned at 60s. instead of 30s. But her share being received in kind, it is unrecognised and unrecorded. This may be made clear by supposing that some other person had fulfilled the wife’s duties. In transferring flour into bread she earns what the baker otherwise would gain in the difference between flour and the price of the loaf. In washing and ironing the family linen she earns what the laundress would charge for the same, minus the cost of soap and coals. In carrying a heavy basket from the distant stores, she earns what the local grocer would have done in the difference between wholesale and retail prices; in making clothes for her children out of her own frayed garments, she earns what the draper would have charged for similar material, and what the dressmaker would have required for making it up. If she patches her husband’s clothes, she earns the tailor’s charge. Her daily scrubbing and cooking may be reckoned at charwoman’s wages, and thus, multiplied by the hours of labour, the proportion may come out. Both she and her husband dimly