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160 per cent a large part is ascribable to professional and personal earnings and less than half of it to capital properly speaking.

My classification of “the rich” as those who possessed incomes of $3,000 and upward per annum in 1916 is decidedly a broad one. There were 375,000 income tax payers classed between $3,000 and $20,000 per annum in that year, and the aggregate of their income was 40 per cent of the total. I do not mean to fix $20,000 as the line of demarcation between those who are rich and those who are simply well-to-do, but merely to point out that this exhibition is in line with all the other evidence respecting the great diffusion of wealth in the United States. There is some concentration in great fortunes like those of Henry Ford and John D. Rockefeller to be sure, but clearly it does not amount to anything like what is popularly supposed.

The two methods of examination that I have used in this paper may be described concisely as (1) analysis of inventory and (2) capitalization of income. Those mere descriptions are in themselves convincing as to the soundness of the thought. Pursuance of the latter has not always been satisfactory, owing to the lack of much desirable data. I am therefore conscious of the deficiencies in my study, but I think it is the most helpful adventure into a complicated subject that has been made up to the present time. While there is a good deal in it that is conjectural there is also a good deal that is positive, especially as to the great percentage. to which the farms, live stock, etc., bulk in the total of the national wealth; also the great percentage of the urban real estate and the widespread ownership thereof. The net worth of the farmers of the country, who are