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100 ECONOMIC INQUIRIES AND STUDIES
formally and fully, and claim the widest attention for
it that I possibly can.

1.
There is much pr£ma facie evidence, then, to begin
with. that the rate of the accumulation of wealth and
the rate of increase of material prosperity may not have
been so great of late years, say during the last tencyears,
as in the twenty or thirty years just before that. Our
fair-trade friends have all along made a tactical mistake
in their arguments. What they have attempted to prove
is that England lately has not been prosperous at all,
that we have been going backwards instead of advanc-
ing, and so on; statements which the simplest appeal
to statistics was sufficient to disprove. But if they had
been more moderate in their contentions, and limited
themselves to showing that the rate of advance, though
there was still advance, was different from and less
than what it was, I for one should have been prepared
to admit that there was a good deal of statistical evi-
dence which seemed to point to that conclusion, as soon
as a sufficient interval had elapsed to show that the
statistics themselves could not be misinterpreted. There
has now been ample time'to allow for minor variations
and fluctuations, and the statistics can be fairly con-
strued.
I have to begin by introducing a short table dealing
with some of the principal statistical facts which are
usually appealed to as signs of general progress and the
reverse, and I propose to go over briefly the items in
that table, and to discuss along with them a few broad
and notorious facts which cannot conveniently be put
in the same form. (See p. 101.)
The first figures are" those of the income tax assess-
ments. What we find is that if we go back thirty years
and compare the amount of income tax assessments in
the U Qited Kingdom at ten years' intervals, there ap-
pears to be an immense progress from 1855 to 1875,