The main brunt of the attack must clearly fall on those whose incomes are above the limit. They are in numbers a small minority, but the amount they possess is incredibly large. The present income of 1,250,000 people, assessed to income, reaches the vast sum of £850,000,000 a year. Taking the whole population of these islands, it is roughly estimated that there are 1½ millions who can be classed as rich, 3½ millions comfortably off, 38 millions as poor, of whom some 12 to 13 millions are in constant need. The existence of the 1½ millions is one of the chief causes of the condition of the 38 millions. In other words, excess above the limit causes want below the limit. The 3½ millions “comfortably off” are most of them occupied in trying to become identified with the select 1½ millions. If we could estimate the amounts in income which these classes represent the figures would be even more startling. The world has certainly never seen larger fortunes than exist to-day, nor has it seen more extensive and more inexcusable poverty. The average rate of luxurious living in the small minority is higher than it has ever been, and the dangerous and degrading effect of want on individuals and on the general community has never been so widespread or so intense. “The rich,” to use a simple term, are nearly all actuated by the same motive. They accept what they have and what they make as their own, to be spent on themselves, according to their own caprice, or on others, if they are so inclined, casting an occasional sop to some charity or philanthropic scheme as a salve to their consciences. There are, it must be acknowledged, a few, a very few who regard their riches as a trust and endeavour to the best of their ability to divert the greater part of it back into remunerative channels without exceeding a reasonable sum for their own personal wants. But as a class they insist that efforts to alter our social system are fruitless, disturbing and doomed to failure, the division of the world into rich and poor being a Providential decree, and if the rich can get service from the poor without their grumbling, that is the most desirable arrangement that can be conceived. To this a reply may be given in the words of Professor Marshall: “Now at least we are setting ourselves seriously to inquire whether it is necessary that there should be any so-called ‘lower class’ at all: that is whether there need be large numbers of people doomed from their birth to hard work in order to provide for others the requisites of a refined and cultured life, while they themselves are prevented by their poverty and toil from having any share in that life.” The case would not be quite so bad as it is if it were only “the requisites of a refined and cultured life” that they were made to provide. But this point must be considered later.