One reason then why labor has not profited more by the great increase in wealth is that the other factors in production have laid claim to their shares also. There is good reason for believing, however, that the share of labor has been steadily growing greater all the time, and that it today gets a larger proportion of the social income than ever before. This fact is obscured by the great growth in population, which has more than doubled in the last hundred years in Europe and has shown a twentyfold increase in the United States. The larger income is divided among more people, and though each today gets more than his grandfather, there is not yet enough produced to make all rich. Indeed, if the wealth of the United States were divided equally, it would not provide a competence for anybody. The difficulty is not merely that there is inequality in distribution, but that the need of a much greater production of wealth must also be met. Inequalities may be adjusted by such measures as progressive inheritance taxes, but resort to this or similar methods must not be so severe as to weaken the motives for the accumulation of capital. That must form one of the strongest reasons for rejecting the drastic proposals of socialism.
Improvements in production have, however, not merely increased the total output; they have greatly reduced the cost of many articles 176 and have brought within the reach of the poorest consumers others which a century ago would have been unattainable. Improvements in transportation have served to bring an ever-increasing variety of products to market. The material progress of a people can be gaged fairly well by their consumption of certain semi-luxuries, such as tea, coffee, sugar, tobacco, beer, etc.; these show a steady increase during the past century. “Thus in the United States between 1871 and 1903 inclusive, the per capita consumption of coffee increased from 7.91 to 10.79 pounds, that of sugar from 36.2 pounds to 71.1 pounds, that of malt liquors from 6.1 gallons to 18.04 gallons, that of wheat and flour from 4.69 bushels to 5.81 bushels.”[52] A similar investigation for Great Britain shows an average increase in a considerably larger list of the same character of 40 per cent between 1860-64 and 1895-96. It must be admitted that there is much lack of economy in present consumption; there is often wasteful and positively injurious consumption, an illustration of which would be found by many persons in the increased consumption of malt liquors cited above. From a purely economic standpoint the enormous waste of war and the burdensome cost of military and naval armament must also be condemned.