Page:Proletarian and Petit-Bourgeois (1912?).pdf/43

Rh not strange that there has been a very considerable concentration of property ownership in a comparatively few hands.

The rapidity with which large fortunes have been acquired is one of the wonders of the modern world. At the present time, the United States numbers its millionaires by thousands. The mere mention of such names as Vanderbilt, Gould, Astor, Rockefeller, Morgan, Havemeyer, Belmont, Whitney, Goelet, Carnegie, Armour, Harriman and Dupont (all of them families numbered among the multi-millionaires whose wealth was acquired, for the most part, since the Civil War) calls to mind the immense concentration of income-yielding wealth which has been going on within the past century. The industrial system is interwinedintertwined [sic] with a device known as private property in income-yielding wealth, which leads inevitably to the concentration of property income in the hands of a comparatively small portion of the population.

The exact figures showing the concentration of property values are unobtainable, and of no great moment in the present discussion. The tendency of income-yielding property to concentrate in a relatively small number of hands is evident on every side. The extent of the concentration cannot, and need not, be ascertained with accuracy.

The actual amounts paid to the men and women who do the work of the industrial world are extremely small. Current wage rates, placed side by side with the expense accounts of thousands of families whose sole claim to income rests upon their ownership of property, are startling in their paucity. Five hundred dollars a year paid to an able-bodied man whose back was bent three hundred days of the year in his efforts to support a wife and four small children; seven dollars a week to the anæmic man whose eye races with his machine along the seams of ladies' coats; fifteen dollars a week to a mechanic, keeping a family in a big city; a thousand dollars a year to a skilled artisan. These wage rates are meagre when