ass of regular workers who, as consumers, have
been injured by machinery. All have gained. The skilled workmen, the
aristocracy of labour, have, as has been shown, gained very
considerably. Even the poor classes of regular unskilled workmen have
raised their standard of comfort.

It is in its bearing on the industrial condition of the very poor, and
those who are unable to get regular work at decent wages, that the
influence of machinery is most questionable. Violent trade fluctuations,
and a continuous displacement of hand-labour by new mechanical
inventions, keep in perpetual existence a large margin of unemployed or
half-employed, who form the most hopeless and degraded section of the
city poor, and furnish a body of reckless, starving competitors for
work, who keep down the standard of wages and of life for the lower
grades of regular workers affected by this competition.

Chapter III.

The Influx of Population into Large Towns.

Sec. 1. Movements of Population between City and Country. The growth of
large cities is so closely related to the problems of poverty as to
deserve a separate treatment. The movements of population form a group
of facts more open than most others to precise measurement, and from
them much light is thrown on the condition of the working classes. That
the towns are growing at the expense of the country, is a commonplace to
which we ought to seek to attach a more definite meaning.

We may trace the inflow of country-born people into the towns by looking
either at the statistics of towns, or of rural districts. But first we
ought to bear in mind one fact. Quite apart from any change in
proportion of population, there is an enormous interchange constantly
taking place between adjoining counties and districts. The general
fluidity of population has been of course vastly increased by new
facilities of communication and migration; persons are less and less
bound down to the village or county in which they were born. So we find
that in England and Wales, only 739 out of each 1000 persons were living
in their native county in 1901. In some London districts it is reckoned
that more than one quarter of the inhabitants change their address each
year. So that when we are told that in seven large Scotch towns only 524
out of each 1000 are natives, and that in Middlesex only 35 per cent. of
the male adult population are Middlesex by birth, we are not thereby
enabled to form any conclusion as