Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 25.djvu/47

Rh comparison would be most instructive; but I was unfortunately too late in applying to the Commissioners of Inland Revenue for the details which I found they were most willing to give. However, the statement they supplied to me and the comparison which can thus be made seem most instructive. They are as follow:

Thus, in spite of the enormous increase of property passing at death, amounting to over 150 per cent, which is more than the increase in the income-tax income, the amount of property per estate has not sensibly increased. The increase of the number of estates is more than double, and greater therefore than the increase of population; but the increase of capital per head of the capitalist classes is in England only 19 per cent, and in the United Kingdom only 15 per cent. Curiously enough, I may state, it is hardly correct to speak of the capitalist classes as holding this property, as the figures include a small percentage of insolvent estates; but allowing all the property to belong to the capitalist classes, still we have the fact that those classes are themselves increasing. They may be only a minority of the nation, though I think a considerable minority, as 55,000 estates passing in a year represent from 1,500,000 to 2,000,000 persons as possessing property subject to probate duty; and these figures, it must be remembered, do not include real property at all. Still, small or large as the minority may be, the fact we have before us is that in the last fifty years it has been an increasing minority, and a minority increasing at a greater rate than the increase of general population. Wealth to a certain extent is more diffused than it was.

If I had been able to obtain more details, it would have been possible to specify the different sizes of estates and the different percentages of increase, from which it would not only have appeared whether the owners of personal property were increasing in number, but whether the very rich were adding to their wealth more than the moderately rich, or vice versa. But it is something to know at least that there are more owners. I trust the Commissioners of Inland Revenue will