. Congress of arts and science, Universal exposition, St. Louis, 1904;. 52 ECONOMIC THEORY have a low one. The accumulation of property by workmen is an influence that retards the growth of numbers, and it is, of course, the higher classes of laborers that are the best able to make such accumulations. Education reduces the rate and the higher classes have the more education. Finally, any prosperity which is long- continued has a tendency to establish a progressive standard of living. Men may even become habituated not merely to living on a certain absolute level, but to living, as the years ad
. Congress of arts and science, Universal exposition, St. Louis, 1904;. 52 ECONOMIC THEORY have a low one. The accumulation of property by workmen is an influence that retards the growth of numbers, and it is, of course, the higher classes of laborers that are the best able to make such accumulations. Education reduces the rate and the higher classes have the more education. Finally, any prosperity which is long- continued has a tendency to establish a progressive standard of living. Men may even become habituated not merely to living on a certain absolute level, but to living, as the years advance, on a higher and higher level. This is the supreme possible result of an era of prosperity, and if it ever becomes an assured and general result, — if men come to require for their personal satisfaction that they shall live in each decade better than they did in the preceding one and shall act accordingly, — all danger that they will sacrifice their gains, and, in so far as laboring-men are concerned, turn the course of progress backward, will be forever removed. Gains for labor will be precursors of no offsetting losses, but rather of further gains, and men will hold their improved stations with an ever- increasing firmness of tenure. The culminating result of progress will be its self-perpetuating tendency — the law that insures that " to him that hath shall be ; It is the function of the statis- tician to measure quantitatively the influences which make for this ideal consummation and to measure the grand resultant effect of them all. Only a study which is profound on the theoretical side and elabo- rate on the statistical side can settle the issue as to whether the favorable conditions are real and how powerfully they 1 What Malthus proved is that when a standard of living is fixed, a quick rise of wages above the amount necessary to sustain this standard causes an increase of the birth-rate and a fall reduces it. If the height of the line
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