Page:Walter Renton Ingalls - Current Economic Affairs (1924).pdf/163

Rh target for invective and taxation, is not in the habit of ! either investing in farms or lending money upon them. f 33 per cent of the wealth of the United States be in farm capital the “rich 2 per cent”’ of the people could not own 65 per cent of the wealth and leave anything for the millions of people other than themselves and the farmers, which result would be a prima facie absurdity.

Even the lowest grade of the laboring classes possess some wealth. Thus, Dr. L. C. Gray in his paper on “Accumulation of Wealth by Farmers” in the American Economic Review, Supplement, for March 1923, estimates that out of 4,161,690 farm laborers, reported in the census for 1920, probably about one-half of them possess independent accumulations of wealth to the amount of an average of $350 per person. There is scarcely a family among wage earners that does not possess something in the way of furniture, clothing, and tools of trade. And, moreover, as will subsequently be shown a majority of them must have something in the savings bank.

Obviously this brings us right up to the consideration that the titular holders of the wealth of the United States may not actually own it free of claim by the money lenders. The farmers of the country do not own their farms in full. The townspeople who have title to their houses to a certain extent have only an equity in them. I have already estimated the mortgages on the latter class of property as amounting to about 6$2/3$ billion dollars. According to the last census there were mortgages on about 40 per cent of the farms, aggregating about eight billion dollars. It does not follow from this, however, that such claims appertain to “the rich.” The greatest lenders of money to the