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Annual Report of the 
to double, giving thirty-two and one-half days each year to collect 
and re-loan, and by educating his children and children’s children 
to continue this humane “justice and general welfare” work until 
the present, they would have been entitled to the snug little sum 
of $43,000,000,000. Here is wealth, accumulated in the possession 
of a single family, aggregating in two hundred and fifty-five years, 
three times the assessed valuation of the entire real estate and per¬ 
sonal property of the United States, and $12,000,000,000 more than 
the true valuation as estimated by the census report of 1870. The 
accumulations of this $10 has been more by the sum of $12,000,000,- 
000 than the true value of all the surplus earnings of the labor of the 
people of this vast country for the two hundred and fifty-five years, 
and more than $2S,000,000,000 above the assessed valuation thereof. 
Yet, with this vast sum in the hands of these few descendants, they 
probably would not have been happy, because when they came to set¬ 
tle up and take the entire property of the country, in 1875, they find 
that they have actually lost in the investment $12,000,000,000, ac¬ 
cording to the true value of the entire property of the country, and 
have lost $28,000,000,000 according to the judgment of the assess¬ 
ors. Is this “ establishing justice, insuring domestic tranquility, 
and promoting the general welfare?” 
Again. We will take the increased gain in wealth in our own 
state from 1860 to 1870. a state rich in agricultural and mineral 
resources, and during a period of great prosperity, a state which 
has increased rapidly in wealth in the last decade, much more so 
than an average of the states of the Union. 
Wisconsin, in 1860, contained property valued at *$350,000,000 
in round numbers, and in 1870, $456,000,000, an increase of a frac¬ 
tion over $100,000,000 in the ten years, or a little above three per 
cent, increase per annum. Had the $350,000,000, the valuation of 
the property of this state in 1860, been owned by foreign capital¬ 
ists and sold to the people of this state at ten per cent, interest, the 
interest collected and re-loaned annually to them at the same rate, 
it would have taken the entire surplus earnings of all our people 
to have paid the aggregated principal and interest at the end of ten 
years, and have been in debt $450,000,000 to the parties of whom 
we purchased. In other words, the entire labor, skilled, educated 
*It is but just to say that this was based upon an increase of 90 per cent, over the 
valuation of 1860, to correspond with the increased valuation of 1870 as determined 
by the board of equalization. 
