is that he should be, in one way or other, lifted out of the groove in which he at present works, and placed in a position compatible with his becoming a sharer in equal proportion with others in the general advantages arising from industrial progress." ("Leading Principles," p. 340.) He thinks it beyond question that the condition of the labouring population is not so linked to the progress of industrial improvements that we may count on it rising _pari passu_ with that progress; because, in the first place, the labourer can only benefit from industrial inventions which cheapen commodities that enter into his expenditure, and the bulk of his expenditure is on agricultural products, which are prevented from being cheapened by the increase of population always increasing the demand for them; and, second, the labourer is practically more and more divorced from the control of capital, and reduced to the position of a recipient of wages, and there is no tendency in wages to grow _pari passu_ with the growth of wealth, because the demand for labour, on which, in the last analysis, the rate of wages depends, is always in an increasing degree supplied by inventions which dispense with labour. He is thus debarred from participating in the advantages of industrial progress either as consumer or as producer: as consumer, by over-population; as producer, by his divorce from capital. Mr. Cairnes, like most economists, differs from socialists in thinking that the first requisite for any material improvement in the condition of the labouring classes lies in effective restraints on population, but he says that "even a very great change in the habits of the labouring classes as bearing upon the increase of population--a change far greater than there seems any solid ground for expecting--would be ineffectual, so long as the labourer remains a mere receiver of wages, to accomplish any great improvement in his state; any improvement at all commensurate with what has taken place and may be expected hereafter to take place in the lot of those who derive their livelihood from the profits of capital" (p. 335). Here he is entirely at one with socialists in believing that the only surety for a sound industrial progress lies in checking the further growth of capitalism by the encouragement of co-operative production, which, by furnishing the labouring classes with a share in the one fund that grows with the growth of wealth, the fund of capital, offers them "the sole means of escape from a harsh and hopeless destiny" (p. 338). Mr. Cairnes, then, agrees with the socialists in declaring that the position of the wage-labourer is becoming less and less securely linked with the progressive improvement of society, and that the only hope of the labourer's future lies in his becoming a capitalist by virtue of co-operation; only, of course, he is completely at issue with them in regard to the means by which this change is to be effected, believing