8. In the savings banks there are 8,600,000 books for a capital of 3,900,000,000 frs., giving an average per book of 455 frs.,20 while the sums deposited in banks and in great firancial establishments as current accounts, and which may be considered as the floating capital of bankers, merchants, and the wealthy classes generally who do not place money in the savings banks, amount to about 1 milliard francs (60,000,000l.).

9. For the last three-quarters of a century the amounts of personalty and realty have been gradually tending to counterbalance one another. In 1826 inherited personal property represented 52 per cent. of realty. In 1892 the sum total of personalty exceeded that of realty by 1 per cent. In 1894 the total amounts were practically identical.

10. During the last fifty or sixty years the rate of interest has decreased from 5 and 6 per cent. to less than 3 per cent., a diminution of 50 per cent. Double the capital is necessary to-day to obtain the same income as formerly.

11. During the same period the wages of all the labouring classes, miners, domestic servants, &c., have increased by 50, 60 and 75 per cent. In support of this calculation M. Neymarck quotes M. Levasseur's book on population, M. Paul Beauregard, M. E. Chevallier and M. de Foville, giving references to their various works.

12. In the great mining companies, such as those at Anzin, Lens, Liévin, Courrières, the sums paid as wages to the miners are four times as large as the amount paid in dividends to the shareholders. On 100 frs. net produce the share of labour is from 75 to 80 per cent.; the share of capital sinks to 25 or 20 per cent.

M. Neymarck concludes his researches as follows:-The 80 milliards of francs (3,200,000,000l.) which compose the government stock of the great countries of the world, form a colossal aggregate which excites much envy and covetousness. When examined, however, the main portion is discovered to be in the hands of humble and thrifty people, all tax-payers, all also electors,

20 Bulletin de statistique et de législation comparée, février, 1895, p. 174.

who are wrongly regarded by a certain jealous and uneasy section of the democracy as public enemies; for this section entirely forgets that "capital is nothing less than the tangible evidence of an improvement in the condition of the people.. Doubtless capital does bring profit to the capitalist, but only by the labour which it initiates and which in turn reproduces it." There is no such thing as a vast financial feudal system controlled by a powerful plutocracy, but, on the contrary, a great financial democracy.

21

To deal any severe blow to these private fortunes, great or small, would be to deal a serious blow to labour. Every fortune honestly gained is respectable, every fortune honestly employed is useful. Any attempt to ruin the capitalist, the man of independent means (rentier), would prove the ruin of the working man, the wage-earner.

In exactly the same proportion that these opportunities for placing and transferring personal property have developed in our country, and that government stock and ordinary and preference shares in great industrial undertakings have gradually come to be regarded as the favourite means of investing capital, the more democratic have these different institutions become, and the higher have wages ascended.

III.-The Registrar-General's Decennial Supplement, 1881-90. By NOEL A. HUMPHREYS.

THE Registrar-General's weekly, quarterly, and annual reports deal with the current mortality and vital statistics of England and Wales. At the close of each decennium, however, the RegistrarGeneral issues an elaborate and detailed supplement to his annual reports, dealing with the statistics of the ten years, comparing them with those for previous decennia, and discussing the influences of the changes on the duration of life, and the evidence they afford of improvement in the health-condition of the nation.

The Decennial Supplement just issued relates to the ten years 1881-90, and is the fourth that has been published by the General Register Office. The decennial reports relating to the periods 1851-60 and 1861-70 were written and compiled by the late Dr. William Farr, the latter of the two being regarded as the magnum opus of that eminent statistician. The report on the ten years 1871-80 is among the best statistical work of Dr. William Ogle, who succeeded Dr. Farr as Statistical Superintendent in the General Register Office. Dr. John Tatham, who was appointed to succeed Dr. Ogle, on his retirement in 1893, is the author of the report just issued, and it is gratifying to be able to congratulate him upon his worthy contribution to the valuable series initiated by his two eminent predecessors. All the best features of the

21 "Les Questions Politiques et Sociales," par Michel Chevalier. (Extract from the Revue des Deux Mondes, 15th July, 1850.)

previous reports have been maintained, and in many respects distinct advance and improvement is in evidence, more especially in the elaborate correction of all local crude rates of mortality for the disturbing influence of the varying age and sex distribution of population. The value of the report, from an educational point of view, to medical officers of health in general cannot well be overrated.

The report displays unmistakable evidence of satisfactory health progress in England and Wales during the ten years with which it deals. The annual death-rate in England and Wales was practically stationary during the thirty years 1841-70 at 22 per 1,000, but under the influence of the Public Health Acts of 1872 and 1875 a distinct decline of mortality was initiated, and in the ten years 1871-80 the mean rate fell to 21°27. The mean death-rate in the succeeding decade 1881-90, dealt with in the supplement just issued, further declined to 1908. Following the example set by Dr. Ogle in the preceding Decennial Supplement, that now issued contains a new life table, based on the mortality statistics of the ten years 1881-90. This life table shows the true effect of the reduced mortality on the mean duration of life among the English nation. Dr. Farr, in his Life Table (No. 3), based upon the mortality in the seventeen years 1838-54, calculated the mean lifetime, or expectation of life at birth, to be 39'9 years for males, and 419 years for females. According to Dr. Ogle's table the mean duration of life had increased in the ten years 1871-80 to 414 years for males and 446 years for females; and Dr. Tatham shows by his new table that the duration of life in 1881-90 had further increased to 43°7 years for males, and to 47°2 years for females. Thus in about forty years nearly four years have been added to the mean lifetime of males, and more than five years to the mean lifetime of females.

It has frequently been pointed out that the increased mean duration of life due to the reduced death-rate in recent years is almost exclusively caused by the marked reduction of infant and child mortality, and of the mortality of young adults; and Dr. Ogle in his report for 1871-80 called attention to the fact that the death-rate both of males and of females above the age of 50 years showed an actual increase on the rates that had prevailed in the preceding decennium. Dr. Tatham, however, in his recent report is able to show that during the ten years 1881-90 this increase of mortality among males and females past middle life had ceased, and that the rates for males at each of the twelve separate ageperiods were lower than those returned in the preceding ten years, with one exception, the age-period 65-75; and that the rates for females showed a decline at each age-period without exception. Dr. Tatham also calls attention to another aspect of the returns for 1881-90 in which they differ from those of the preceding ten years. The reduction in the rate of mortality in the recent decennium was slightly greater among males than among females; whereas in the preceding ten years the decrease had been considerably greater among females than among males.

The recent changes in the rates of mortality referred to the

twenty-four diseases, or groups of diseases, separately dealt with in the decennial supplement, are carefully examined and discussed by Dr. Tatham in his report. Among the diseases which in the latest decennium showed an increased mortality may be noted measles, diphtheria, heart diseases, cancer, and diabetes. Under most of the other headings a decline is shown which is most marked among the deaths referred to small-pox, scarlet fever, whooping cough, typhus, enteric fever, diarrhoeal diseases, and phthisis. The local mortality statistics of cancer and phthisis are analysed with much care, after correction for the disturbing influence of varying age distribution of the population, which throws a new light upon local cancer rates, the causation of which had apparently been previously to some extent misunderstood. The much debated question as to the reality of the increase in the recorded death-rate from cancer in recent years is not discussed in this supplement, and a satisfactory conclusion on this point is rendered exceedingly difficult by the constant and increasing efforts that have been made by the Registrar-General since 1881 to improve the material on which these statistics are based, by addressing special inquiries. to the certifying practitioners whenever the medical certificate of the cause of death is insufficient for satisfactory classification. As the direct result of inquiry in cases certified as due to " tumour" a large number of deaths have, for instance, been referred to cancer, while it is impossible to estimate the additional number of deaths that have been certified to this disease through the indirect effect of these inquiries. Thus, while the number of deaths referred to cancer has undoubtedly increased rapidly in recent years, there is no means for determining how much of this increase is due to improved classification. The increase of cancer mortality has been much greater among males than among females, which is attributed to the fact that females suffer to a far greater extent than males from external cancer, which is much more easily diagnosed than cancer affecting the internal organs.

It should be stated that the volume recently issued is only Part 1 of the Supplement, and we are informed that Part 2 will be specially devoted to occupational mortality, which was one of the most valuable features of Dr. Ogle's report on the statistics of 1871-80. Before his retirement, and during the preparation of the report on the census in 1891, provision was made by Dr. Ogle for extended and more detailed statistics relating to the influence of occupation on mortality. Dr. Tatham's analysis and report on the results of these statistics will therefore be included in Part 2 of the Decennial Supplement, which will be anticipated with much interest. Part 2 will also include, there is reason to believe, a new healthy district life table, based upon the mortality statistics of those registration districts which in the ten years 1881-90 showed the lowest mean annual death-rate. Dr. Farr's Healthy District Life Table contributed to the "Transactions of the Royal Society," in 1859 was based upon the observation of about 5,000,000 years of life in sixty-three registration districts during the five years 1849-53. Since 1853 the rates of mortality have very considerably declined in the healthiest, as well as in

other, parts of England and Wales, and the results of this new healthy district life table will form a valuable standard by which the loss of life in the less favoured districts may be measured. A comparison of the two healthy district life tables will be full of interest.

IV.-The London Census, 1896.

THE results of the first quinquennial census of London, taken on the night of 29th March, 1896, in accordance with Section 3 of the London (Equalisation of Rates) Act, 1894, were published as a Parliamentary paper by the Local Government Board at the close of last session. Only a bare enumeration of the population is given, with no particulars as to age, sex, or birth place. The accompanying table gives the number of persons in the civil parishes compared with the census of 1891, but in any comparison of the census of 1896 with that of 1891 and with those taken earlier in the century it must always be borne in mind that the interval between the present census and its immediate predecessor only consists of five years, whereas all the other inter-censal periods have been decennial.