There are still to be witnessed in the Queen's realm those violent contrasts between vast wealth and grinding poverty, which must ever arise in every civilised State in periods of great commercial and productive activity. They are a standing perplexity and distress to philanthropists; but one of the brightest features in the reign of Queen Victoria, of infinitely deeper significance than the accumulation of riches by the nation and by individuals, is the degree to which that wealth has penetrated the middle and industrial classes. The effect of the application of steam to machinery, which coincided so nearly with the beginning of the present reign, was, indeed, injurious to certain limited industries, but the general result has been a continuous rise in the wages paid to artisans. The first few years of the factory system, coupled with a lamentable ignorance of, and indifference to, sanitary principles, brought a terrible increase of disease, squalor, and suffering in their train. This soon attracted the attention of philanthropists, among whom the leading place must be assigned to the Earl of Shaftesbury; and year by year the two rival political parties have vied with each other in applying remedial and protective legislation to the evils of overcrowding, insanitary dwellings, and other dangers besetting extraordinary industrial activity. There are slums still, but they must be hunted for, instead of forcing themselves on attention as was the case not long ago in almost every large town. Artisans' dwellings, far exceeding in comfort, in solidity, and in sanitation anything that our forefathers may have dreamt of, are now the rule and not the exception. Mere quotation of figures will not make clear the increased share of the national wealth which now finds its way into the pockets of the working classes, because the unprecedented cheapness of all the necessaries and many of the luxuries of life (intoxicants alone excepted) has raised the buying power of wages in a degree which cannot be estimated. Mr. W. H. Mallock, a well-known writer on this subject, has recently devoted some close enquiry to it, and has brought out some remarkable results. He quotes the calculation of statisticians upon the income of the nation in 1851, when it was estimated at £600,000,000, and in 1881, when it was reckoned at £1,200,000,000, having doubled itself in thirty years. He then deducts from these totals the amounts assessed to income-tax, arriving by this process at the total paid in wages (or the total of all incomes under £150), which was £340,000,000 in 1851, and £660,000,000 in 1881. In those thirty years the wage-earning class had increased in number from 26,000,000 to 30,000,000, or 16 per cent., while the wages paid to them had increased by nearly 100 per cent. In fact the income of the working classes in 1881 was about equal to that of the whole nation in 1851, with largely increased purchasing power, owing to reduction in prices.