Much of the matter contained in the "Statistical Monographs" was condensed by me in a volume called _Social Reform_. This was a study, more minute and extensive than any which I had attempted before, of the income of this country and its distribution among various classes of the population, not only as they were at the beginning of the twentieth century, but also as they were in the earlier years of the nineteenth. My authorities with regard to the latter were certain elaborate but little known official papers showing the results of the income tax of the year 1801. These returns, by means of a minute classification, show the number of incomes from those between L60 and L70 up to those exceeding L5,000, the upshot being that the masses--manual and other wage-workers--were enjoying just before the war an average income per head more than double that which would have been possible a hundred years ago had the entire income of the country--the incomes of rich and poor alike--been then divided in equal shares among everybody. This same general fact had been broadly insisted on in _Labor and the Popular Welfare_. It was here demonstrated in detail by official records, to which I had not had access at the time when I wrote that volume, and of the very existence of which most politicians are probably unaware to-day. _Social Reform_ was, however, published at an unlucky moment. It had not reached more than a small number of readers before the war, for a time, put a stop to economic thought, and left men to illustrate economic principles by action, thereby providing fresh data for economic theory of the future. CHAPTER XVII THE AUTHOR'S WORKS SUMMARIZED A Boy's Conservatism--Poetic Ambitions--The Philosophy of Religious Belief--The Philosophy of Industrial Conservatism--Intellectual Torpor of Conservatives--Final Treatises and Fiction. I began these memoirs with observing that they are in part a mere series of sketches and social anecdotes strung on the thread of the writer's own experiences, and as such illustrating the tenor of his social and mental life, but that in part they are illustrative in a wider sense than this. His literary activities may be looked on as exemplifying the moral and social reactions of a large number of persons, to the great changes and movements in thought and in social politics by which the aspect of the world has been affected, both for them and him, from the middle years of the reign of Queen Victoria onward. Regarding myself, then, as more or less of a type, and reviewing my own activities as circumstances have called them into play and as these memoirs record them, I may briefly redescribe them, and indicate their sequence thus.