F.— EC!ONOMIC SCIENCE AND STATISTICS. 147 



gives a dream and a goal. In this sense the inequality serves to urge 

 many to greater efforts than would otherwise be made if all were on a 

 dead level of attainment and power. 



At the same time, so far as this country is concerned, if there were 

 no inherited wealth at all, it might be easier for the average mind to accept 

 as inevitably associated with difference in human capacity, and even with 

 the luck of the game, inequalities of fortune arising entirely in their own 

 lifetime. But the rooted practice of the ' legitime ' in France gives an 

 entirely different outlook upon the abolition of inheritance altogether in 

 its psychological influence. 



I can give the answer to question 11 only generally, viz. that ideas 

 concerning the standard of life and fair wages are relative and not absolute. 

 As arrived at subjectively, they are of little use as an indication of economic 

 actualities or possibilities. I have dealt with this elsewhere.^" 



The right of bequest and the right of inheritance respectively may 

 differ as incentives. When we come to consider the effect of an 

 inheritance system, we have four sections to study. We divide, first, 

 on a time basis, into those living at the time wealth is accumulated in 

 response to the stimulus of the system, and those living at later times 

 when the wealth accumulated has been inherited, and when the system 

 has the effect of ' dictating ' the distribution of currently produced wealth. 

 Again, we di\'ide the people in each period into two functional sections, 

 those who do the accumulating and those who watch others do it. 



Here we are in the field of personal views about human psychology in 

 the mass, although the statistics of the growth of life insurance, and the 

 proportion of wealth left out of the direct family line, are valuable. There 

 is room for research into systematic life-insurance statistics, but the 

 indications are clear that the family-provision incentive (including a 

 buttress against death duties) is more powerful even than formerly. 

 There is fair statistical evidence that the proportion of amounts bequeathed 

 to distant relatives and ' strangers ' to those bequeathed to close relatives 

 was relatively stationary in the depressed eighties, and, with the rising 

 tide of prosperity in the twenty years before the war, slowly rose and has 

 since fallen. Two kinds of incentive must be distinguished — the first 

 is to save more out of a definite income or work, and the second is to 

 produce more in order that still more may be saved. Two kinds of 

 objectives must be distinguished : first, provision for old age merging into 

 provision for a surviving widow, but irrespective of children's welfare ; and, 

 second, provision definitely for children or others. A positive and a 

 negative side must be distinguished : first, the positive right to bequeath 

 may have less importance in creating savings that would otherwise not 

 exist, than the knowledge that all savings would be annihilated would 

 have in stopping savings coming into existence at all. If there were no 

 power to bequeath by inter vivos giving, there would be a great tendency 

 to individual cZecumulation. 



My own view, after long consideration of the available data, is that the 

 power to bequeath savings that will remain intact is a most important 

 factor in wealth accumulation and saving, and the desire to leave these 

 savings for the direct line, children and grandchildren, is an important 



"> Wealth and Taxable Capacity, iii. Also Christian Ethic as an Economic Factor. 



l2 



