Labour and the Popular Welfare

The enormous increase in our national income and our national capital is doubted or denied by no one. Now let us express the increase in income as a supposed increase in the average height of the rooms inhabited by the population. According, then, to the figures given by me, we might say in this case that at the beginning of the century the average house was seven feet high—only high enough for tall men to stand up in; and that now houses have been so improved that the average height of a living-room is seventeen feet.

If any one, dwelling on the fact of such a change as this, were inquiring into its causes, and were basing arguments on its assumed reality, what difference would it make if some opponent were to prove triumphantly that the height of the average room now was not seventeen feet, but sixteen feet six inches, and that four generations ago it had been six feet instead of seven?