Page:The Scientific Monthly vol. 3.djvu/369

 OUR NATIONAL PROSPERITY 3^3

is not a product of labor, it is merely a *' capitalized value'* of an in- come consisting of the products of labor.

That the present distribution of wealth in the United States is ex- ceedingly unequal is yearly becoming more and more apparent to even less thoughtful people. The question of the injustice in the distribu- tion of either property or income, or of a remedy for that injustice, is not here at stake. Our purpose is to present graphically the spectacle of inequality as it exists, and its relation to our national prosperity of which we are accustomed to boast. We will first examine the distri- bution of property and then the distribution of income, for these cor- respond to the two ways in which we may think of prosperity.

There being no recent figures in regard to the distribution of prop- erty, it is necessary to content ourselves with the distribution of 1890. Fig. 1 shows in a graphic manner the distribution of 1890, but trans- formed so that the total wealth and population correspond to 1913. Since concentration is increasing, we may bear in mind that inequalities in distribution shown by this diagram are less than the actual inequali- ties of to-day. The family instead of the individual is here taken as the unit. The presumption is that immarried adults are considered as families of one each, so that with few exceptions the total wealth of the country is represented in the diagram. Each family averages about five persons, of which two are, on the average, " gainfully employed/'

The horizontal base line of the figure must be imagined as divided into 19,200,000 equal parts, one for each family in the country. The families are arranged in the order of their wealth, the wealthiest at the right end and the poorest at the left end. If over each of these minute divisions we erect a vertical line the height of which represents the amount of wealth owned by that family, the tops of these vertical lines can be connected by a continuous curved line, as shown. Since these vertical lines are arranged in the order of their length, the curved line or locus will everywhere slope up from left to right, but, aside from this, it might have any form according to the manner in which the total wealth was distributed among the families.

The striking feature of such a diagram is the fact that its area represents the total amount of wealth, and any portion of its area en- closed between vertical lines represents the wealth owned by the portion of the population that these lines intercept on the base line. The lined area, then, is the total wealth of the country, and that the great bulk of this weaia. lays ^th the first tenth of S population is fvident at a glance. Imagine the figure as a great piece of land of just that shape and of uniform fertility and usefulness throughout. Then if we divide it up by 19,200,000 equi-spaced fences, parallel to the straight line at the right end, the narrow strips so formed would be distributed one to each family, and as shown by the figure the first 10 or 20 per cent, of

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