CHANGES IN OWNERSHIP OF WEALTH 325 



the direct products of work. We may therefore Book iv 

 here adopt the rough hypothesis that out of each 

 generation of our wealthy class a third part is 

 enriching itself by the process of direct production, 

 and two-thirds are living on the products produced 

 for them indirectly by the capital or the means of pro- 

 duction which were created by their fathers and their 

 grandfathers. Now such being the case, what we 

 have to notice is as follows. Though the members But though 



r 1 i i i , . i inheritance 



of the wealthy class are not always changing, as they gives a certain 



would be were no saving of capital, no interest, 



no bequest allowed, they are still changing gradually 



from generation to generation, so that whilst the belonging to u 



are constantly, 



class, as a class, always possesses a nucleus ofifsiowiy, 

 families with whom wealth and the traditions of 

 wealth are hereditary, a number of individuals born 

 in it are constantly disappearing over its borders, and 

 a number of other individuals are constantly passing 

 into it. 1 



1 The most permanent form of hereditary wealth is land ; but 

 only a small minority of our existing landed families existed as 

 landed families at the time of the last Heralds' visitation. Thus, 

 though the estates of this country are as old as the country itself, the 

 actual possession of a large proportion of them by their owners, at 

 any given time, represents their purchase by wealth recently created, 

 and is, in fact, recent wealth converted into another form. 



And if there is a change like this in the possession of landed 

 wealth, there is a still more rapid change in the possession of 

 commercial capital. One of the many childish assumptions of Karl 

 Marx was the assumption on which a good deal of his reasoning 

 rests that the English middle classes of the present century owed 

 their capital and positions to social opportunities which had come to 

 them as the heirs and descendants of the merchants and wealthier 



