The Arizona champion., 1890-05-17
Natnonal Wealth.

fore the Royal Statistical Societ
 on the accumulated wealth of n;
 tions. He places the wealth (
 Great Britain, Tn round numbers, a
 s50,OoO, ,0OO,OOO. giving Englan
 $l,54O a head, Scotland SL,215
 and Ireland $465. Comparing tn
 three richest nations of the world he gives the wealth per head as fol lows: Great Britain, $l, ,450
 France, $50; and the United States
 $500. If this shows anything i
 shows the utter fallacy and supreme folly of averages as applied to mat
 ters of this sort. By Gifen's com
 putation there ought to be nearly three times as much abject poverty in the United States as in Great Britain, for if the average wealth per capita is not a measure of the comparative wealth of the people, and consequently of their poverty, it is not a measure of anything; and yet every schoolboy knows that the poverty of the United States is not comparable with that of Great Britain. In the city of London alone, so says English writers, there are nearly 2,0O0,O00 people who are all the time on the very verge of starvation. In the same city lies the enormous 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 1t 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 tue number of people. Again, Mr. Giffen falls into serious erior ill estimating the mass of the wealth of Great Britain, and this, of course, is carried all the way through his calculations, He includes all the investments of British capital abroad, as though they were sub stantial part of the wealth of the wealth of the kingdom. It is ob- vious that all such investments should be carried on a suspense ac- count, for they are extremely un- certain. 4 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 a great portion of what Mir. Giffen considers a part of the national wealth, and would re-
 duce the per capita distribution very materially. As 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 S6I.- 69,000,000. exclusive of public property. A moments reflection will show that the excluded proper ty, 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 S1O,OO0,OOO,OOO, so it is entirely fair to estimate the wealth of the United States at $72,O0O,O0O,0 ,0J0 in round numbers, or nearly one half more than that of Great Brit ain as Mr. Gifen estimates it
 After all, though, the real wealth of nation does not consist so much in tangible property as in the ability to hold its own in case of emergen- cy. The reserve force of country its undeveloped resources and unex- hausted sources of supply, are what constitute the real, substantial wealth of nation. A nation in that respect is like an individual i the best mau is not the man with ! simply the most muscle, but the one with nerve and endurance and in- domitable courage. The best test : of the comparative wealth of Great
 Britain and the United States is to conceive of them as menaced by a
 common danger, says European
 coalition directed against them. In
 such an event the wealth of Great