Page:Walter Renton Ingalls - Current Economic Affairs (1924).pdf/167

Rh internally, in one way or another. As has been previously shown the mortgagees are in the last analysis great in number, wherefore there is implied a diffuse distribution of these claims. We may come positively to another conclusion. About one third of the national wealth is in farm capital. Nearly one half of the American urban homes are occupied by their owners. Combining these thoughts with the wide distribution of savings bank accounts, life insurance policies, government bonds, and the stocks and bonds of corporations it is indisputable that the American people are preponderatingly property owners.

Even the property of the railways and industrial corporations is widely distributed through stock ownership. Thus, at the end of 1922 the Pennsylvania Railroad had 140,000 stockholders and 90,000 bond holders, whose combined number was almost equal to the employees of that company, who aggregated about 243,000. So it is with many of the great industrial companies, such as the United States Steel Corporation, the General Electric Co., the General Motors Co., the public service corporations like American Telephone and Telegraph Co., and so on.

The Interstate Commerce Commission recently completed the compilation of the number of stockholders of Class 1 railroads as of Dec. 31, 1922. Class 1 railroads are roads with operating revenue above one million dollars annually and represents all of the important mileage of the railroads of the country. There were at that time 777,132 railroad stockholders, which was an increase of 24,165 stockholders over the same date in 1921. Thus it appears that considerably more than three-quarters of a million persons own the railroads of