344 



THE WONDERFUL CENTURY. 



This increase of individual wealth is most clearly 

 shown by the rise and continuous increase of million- 

 aires, who, by various modes, have succeeded in possess- 

 ing themselves of vast amounts of riches created by 

 others, thus necessarily impoverishing those who did 

 create it. Sixty or seventy years ago a millionaire was 

 a rarity. I well remember, in my boyhood, my father 

 reading in the Times an account of the death of a man 

 (a merchant, I think) who had left a fortune of a mil- 

 lion, as something altogether marvellous which he had 

 never heard of before. ]SIow, they are to be reckoned 

 by scores, if not by hundreds, in this country, and excite 

 no special remark; while in America, a country having 

 a much larger amount of natural wealth and of human 

 labor to draw upon, they are far more numerous, reach- 

 ing, it is estimated, about two thousand. 



In our own country the annual produce of labor, from 

 which the whole expenditure of the people necessarily 

 comes, is estimated at 1350 millions sterling; and this 

 amount is so unequally divided that one million persons 

 among the wealthy receive more than twice as much of 

 this income as the twenty-six million constituting the 

 manual labor class. In America the inequality is still 

 greater, there being 4047 families of the rich who own 

 about five times as much property as 6,599,796 families 

 of the poor. 



The causes of this enormous inequality of distribu- 

 tion, and of all the evils that flow from it, are alike in 

 both countries the practical monopoly of the land and 

 all the mineral wealth it contains, by one section of the 

 wealthy, and of what is usually termed capital by an- 

 other; resulting in the monopoly by these two classes, 



