The St. Johns herald., 1890-01-23
National Wealth.

lcs, has recently read paper be
 fore the Royal Statistical Societ,
 on the accumulated wealth of na
 tions. He places the wealth o
 Great Britain, in round numbers, a
 $50,000,000,000, giving England
 $1,540 head. Scotland S1 ,215, anc
 Ireland $465. Comparing the thret
 richest nations of the world, ht
 gives the wealth ger head as fol
 lows: Great Britain, $1 ,450; France,
 $950; and the United States, $500.
 If this shows anything it shows the
 utter fallacy and supreme folly of
 averages as applied to matters of
 this sort. By Gifen's computation
 there ought to be nearly three times
 as much abject poverty in the Uni
 ted States as in Great Britain, for if
 the average wealth per capita IS not a measure of the comparative
 wealth of the people, and conse- Quently of their poverty, it is not a
 measure of anything and yet every
 schoolboy knows that the poverty
 of the United States is not com
 parable with that of Great Britain.
 In the city of London alone, so say
 English writers, there are nearly 100000 people who are all the time on the very verge of starva- tion. In the same city lies the enor-
 nous landed property of the Duke
 of Westminster, who counts his wealth by millions; and yet Mir. Giffen talks about the per capita
 wealth of Great Britain as though
 it meant something. If one man had it all, the figures of per capita wealth would be the same, for they are arrived at by dividing the sum  total of the wealth by the number of people. Again, Mr. Giffen falls into a serious error in estimating the mass=of thesyF7v~;t1!s of Great Britain, and this, of course, Is car iied all the way through his calcu- lations. He includes all the invest ments of British capital abroad, as though they were substantial part of the wealth of the kingdom. It is obvious that all such investments should be carried on a suspense ac- count, tor they are extremely un- certain. A revolution or two in South America, an attack by Rus sia on Turkey, a revolt in Egypt, in fact almost any event of that sort, would wipe out great portion of what Mir. Gif1en considers a part of the national wealth, and would re- duce the per capita distribution very materially. As a supplement to Gifen's figures there may be pre- sented the estimate of the National wealth of the United States com piled from the returns in the offices of the treasurers of the several States. This computation puts the wealth of the United States at $61,- 459,000,000, exclusive of public property. A moments reflection will show that the excluded prop erty, which embraces the property owned by the General Government and by State, county and city gov ernments, and also the public do- main, cannot be rated at less than $10,000, 100000, so it is entirely fair to estimate the wealth of the Uni ted States at $72,00O,OO0,000 in round numbers, or nearly one-half more than that of Great Britain as Mir. Giffen estimates it. After all, though, the real wealth of a nation does not consist so much in tam gible property as in the ability to hold its own in case of emergency. The reserve force of a country, its undeveloped resources and unex- hausted sources of supply, are what I constitute the real, substantial wealth of nation. 4 nation in that respect is like an individual the best man is not the man with &l,.o l,,4 H. {