would depress the amount paid to each individual labourer. "In England and Scotland," says Mr. Morison, "the classes living by wages form the majority of the population." It has been estimated by Mr. Greg that the annual amount paid in wages is a hundred and forty millions sterling; to which may be added twenty millions for the board of domestic servants. The profits of all the operations of industry to the capitalists are estimated by Mr. Morison at ninety millions. The census returns show that there were three hundred and fifty-four thousand masters in trades, and farmers, employing fourteen hundred thousand men. This gives a proportion of about four men employed to one employer. Compared with the estimate of profits it shows that each employer, assuming the calculation to be correct, would derive a revenue of two hundred and fifty pounds a year as the recompense of his capital, skill, and risk. This is not so large an aggregate profit as is ordinarily supposed. The men employed would each receive a revenue of one hundred a year. But we must add a large number to the men receiving wages, who would not be returned by their employers; and the calculation of payments must be further diminished by the consideration that in many branches of industry, and in factory labour especially, a very large number of females are employed, as well as boys. But the fact of the general proportion of wages to profits is sufficiently striking to show that the inequality of the condition of the labourer and the employer is not so extravagantly great as we have been accustomed of late years to hear asserted. In looking back upon the historical evidence which we possess, imperfect as it is, of the condition of society at various periods of our industrial progress, we cannot doubt that there has been a process constantly going forward by which the circumstances of all classes have been steadily raised. In the table of Gregory King, which we have several times referred to, the average income of ten thousand merchants is put down at three hundred a year; of shopkeepers and tradesmen at forty-five pounds; of farmers at forty-two pounds; and of labouring people at fifteen pounds. The income of gentlemen is taken at two hundred and eighty pounds a year. The increase of the means of these various classes at the present day as compared with the end of the seventeenth century, has certainly been threefold. If we turn to the passage which we have quoted from the 'Chronicon Preciosum,' originally published in 1707, we may at once compare the advantages which a threefold increase of means will procure. Wheat is not six pounds a quarter, nor broadcloth two pounds fourteen shillings a yard,--which would be the case if we trebled the prices of 1707. We have abundance of conveniences and comforts of which the people of Queen Anne's reign had no notion, which have been bestowed upon us by manufactures, and commerce, and scientific agriculture.