I have alluded to the incomes of foreign countries only for the sake of throwing more light on the income of our own. Let us again turn to that. Half of that income, as we have seen, consists to-day of an annual product new since the time when men still in their prime were children; and this mysterious addition to our wealth has rapidly and silently developed itself, without one person in a thousand being aware of its extent, or realising the operation of any new forces that might account for it. Let people of middle age look back to their own childhood; and the England of that time, in aspects and modes of life, will not seem to them very different from what it seems now. Let them turn over a book of John Leech’s sketches, which appeared in _Punch_ about the time of the first Exhibition; and, putting aside a few changes in feminine fashion, they will see a faithful representation of the life that still surrounds them. The street, the drawing-room, the hunting-field, the railway-station—nothing will be obsolete, nothing out-of-date. Nothing will suggest that since these sketches were made any perceptible change has come over the conditions of our civilisation. And yet, somehow or other, some changes have taken place, owing to which our income has nearly doubled itself. ◆¹ In other words, the existence of one-half of our wealth is due to causes, the nature, the presence, and the operation of which, are hidden so completely beneath the surface of life as to escape altogether the eye of ordinary observation, and reveal themselves only to careful and deliberate search. [Sidenote ◆1 For, unless we understand the causes which have made our national income grow, we may, by interfering with them unknowingly, make our income decrease:] ◆¹ The practical moral of all this is obvious: that just as our income has doubled itself without our being aware of the causes, and almost without our being aware of the fact, so unless we learn what the causes are, and are consequently able to secure for them fair play, or, at all events, to avoid interfering with their operation, we may lose what we have gained even more quickly than we have gained it, and annihilate the larger part of what we are desirous to distribute. We have seen that the national income is a living thing; and, as is the case with other living things, the principles of its growth reside in parts of the body which are themselves not sensitive to pain, but which may for the moment be deranged and injured with impunity, and will betray their injury only by results which arise afterwards, and which may not be perceived till it is too late to remedy them. [Sidenote ◆1 And this is the danger of reckless social legislation.]