The increase of population was very small during the first fifty years of the eighteenth century. It absolutely declined at one period. The two million four hundred thousand pounds that were calculated by Gregory King as annual savings, were probably more and more trenched upon by pauperism and war, by "malice domestic, foreign levy," under a disputed succession. The upper classes were licentious and extravagant; the labourers in towns were drunkards to an excess that now seems hardly credible. Hogarth's 'Gin Lane' was scarcely an exaggeration of the destitution and misery that attended this national vice. About the middle of the century, or soon after, sprang up many of the great mechanical improvements which made us a manufacturing people; and which, in half a century, added a third to the population. In spite of the most expensive war in which England had ever been engaged, the accumulated capital, chiefly in consequence of these discoveries and improvements, had increased as fast as the population in the second fifty years of the eighteenth century. In the present century the population has doubled in fifty years; and the accumulated capital has more than doubled. Population has been recently increasing at the rate of one and a half per cent.; capital has been increasing at the rate of two and a half per cent.[43] It is this accumulation which has been steadily raising the rate of wages in many employments of industry; whilst the chemical and mechanical arts, the abundant means of rapid transit, the abolition or reduction of duties upon great articles of consumption, and the freedom of commercial intercourse, have given all the receivers of wages a greatly increased command of articles of necessity, and even of what used to be thought luxuries. There is nothing more difficult in economical inquiries than the attempt to ascertain what was the actual rate of wages at any given period. The fluctuations in the value of money enter into this question, more or less, at every period of our history. We find the nominal rate of wages constantly increasing, from one generation to another, but we cannot at all be certain that the real rate is increasing. That nominal rate always requires to be compared with the prices of the necessaries of life. What pertains to wages pertains to all fixed money-payments. A Fellow of a college applied to Bishop Fleetwood to know if he could conscientiously hold his fellowship, when the statutes of the college, made in the time of Henry VI., say that no one shall so hold who has an estate of 5_l._ a year. The Fellow had an estate of much larger nominal amount. The Bishop made a very valuable collection of the prices of commodities, and he thus answers the conscientious inquirer:--