In turning from the working-classes as a whole to the poor, it becomes
evident that the most substantial benefit they have received from
falling prices is cheap bread. Cheap groceries and lighting are also
gains, though it must be remembered that the modes of purchase to which
the very poor are driven to have recourse minimize these gains. On
clothes the poor spend a very small proportion of their incomes, the
very poor virtually nothing. In the case of the lowest classes of the
towns, it is probable that the rise in rents offsets all the advantages
of cheapened prices for other commodities.

The importance of the bearing of this fact is obvious. Even were it
clearly proved that the wages of the working-classes were increasing
faster in proportion than the incomes of the wealthier classes, it would
not be thereby shown that the standard of comfort in the former was
rising as fast as the standard of comfort in the latter. If we confine
the term "poor" to the lower grades of wage-earners, it would probably
be correct to say that the riches of the rich had increased at a more
rapid rate than that at which the poverty of the poor had diminished.
Thus the width of the gap between riches and poverty would be absolutely
greater than before. But, after all, such absolute measurements as these
are uncertain, and have little other than a rhetorical value. What is
important to recognize is this, that though the proportion of the very
poor to the whole population has somewhat diminished, never in the whole
history of England, excepting during the disastrous period at the
beginning of this century, has the absolute number of the very poor been
so great as it is now. Moreover, the massing of the poor in large
centres of population, producing larger areas of solid poverty, presents
new dangers and new difficulties in the application of remedial
measures.