Population and Sustenance. 71 



from these the " true value " may be put at $13,000,000,000. 

 In 1870 it was as given by our census tables $80,000,000,000, 

 giving an increase greater in the last decade by 80 per cent. 

 than the total previous accumulations since the first settlement 

 of the country by Europeans ; this, too, in a decade of unpar- 

 alleled public and private expenditure, of immense waste and 

 destruction of both laborers and their products. This would 

 give nearly $1,000 a piece to every man, woman and child in 

 the whole country, an increase of more then 100 per cent. 

 over the average portion of each at the beginning of the de- 

 cade.* 



In France in the decade ending in 1860, the increase of 

 population was 2.6 per cent. ; the increase of annual product 

 44 per cent., and the average share of each inhabitant in the 

 annual products was 40 per cent, greater than in 1850. The in- 

 creased value of each acre's share in the total wealth ia sup- 

 posed to have been considerably greater than this, but the 

 statistics are not at hand. 



In Great Britain ihe average of the total values of the prop- 

 erty of the kingdom to each person were in 1851, $827; in 

 1861, $1,074; and in 1866, $1,239, being an increase of 50 

 per cent, in fifteen years. So that in Great Britain it is not 

 because there is less increase of means of subsistence than of 

 population that there is danger of starvation and need of pre- 

 ventive checks, but because there is somehow an inequitable 

 distribution of the products of labor. 



The following proposition will answer for a brief summa- 

 tion : 



♦Exceptions have been taken to the above statistics and to the inferences liliely to be 

 drawn from them, on the score of the decrease in the " purchasing power " of money. 

 Probably some modification should be made on that account, but not nearly so much as 

 has been thought by many. The vast increase of gold and silver within the last twenty- 

 five years, and the inrtation by means of paper currency in the last ten, while changing 

 the money price of many articles of ordinary traffic, has not left the values of some of 

 the more permanent kinds of property as measured by money, nearly unaltered except 

 as due lo other causes, as the latter are many times greater than the former, the prob- 

 ability is that the variation to be made in the estimate is comparatively moderate. 



