Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 25.djvu/50

42 of people receiving good incomes from trades and professions out of all proportion to the increase of population. We can not but infer from this that the number of the moderately rich is increasing, and that there is little foundation for the assertion that the rich are becoming richer. All the facts agree. The working-classes have had large additions to their means; capital has increased in about equal ratio; but the increase of capital per head of the capitalist classes is by no means so great as the increase of working-class incomes.

I should wish further to point out, however, that it is a mistake to speak of the income in the various schedules to the income-tax as the income of a few, or exclusively of classes which can be called capitalist, or rich. A suspicion of this has already been raised by the facts as to trades and professions. Let me just mention this one little fact in addition. Out of £190,000,000 assessed under Schedule A in 1881-'82, the sum of £11,359,000 was exempted from duty as being the income of people whose whole income from all sources was under £150 a year. If we could get at the facts as to how the shares of public companies are held, and as to the immense variety of interests in lands and houses, we should have ample confirmation of what has already appeared from the probate-duty figures, that there is a huge minority interested in property in the United Kingdom, great numbers of whom would not be spoken of as the capitalist classes.

To test the question as to whether there has been any disproportionate increase of capital, and of the income from it, in yet another way, I have endeavored to make an analysis of the income-tax returns themselves, distinguishing in them what appears to be the income of idle capital from income which is derived not so much from the capital itself as from the labor bestowed in using the capital. Only the roughest estimate can be made, and the data, when we go back to 1843, are even more incomplete than they are now; but I have endeavored as far as possible to give everything to capital that ought to be given, and not to err on the side of assigning it too small a share. The whole of Schedule A is thus assigned to capital, although it is well known that not even in Schedule A is the income obtained without exertion and care and some risk of loss, which are entitled to remuneration. In Schedule D also I have allowed that all the income from public companies and foreign investments is from idle capital, although here the vigilance necessary and the risks attendant on the business are really most serious, and part of the so-called profit is not really interest on idle capital at all, but strictly the remuneration of labor. I have also rather exaggerated than depreciated the estimate for capital employed in trades and professions, my estimate being rather more than that of Mr. Dudley Baxter in his famous paper on the "National Income." With these explanations I submit the following estimate of the share of capital in the income-tax income at different dates: