CHAPTER VI.

THE WEALTH OF ENGLAND.

The foregoing survey of the leading industrial and commercial branches of the Teutonic race in this century has been more especially directed to the qualities displayed in their history and some of the more modern developments in material progress during the present century. The world hardly realizes all that England has done for it, or how wonderfully she has grown in the last two generations. Americans, especially, have been so intent in pushing forward their own great and profitable undertakings, and so satisfied and impressed with their great success as to have given very imperfect attention to the progress of England during the same time; or, if the greatness and breadth of English activities have been clearly appreciated, they have been inclined to assume that its gradual accumulations in former centuries gave it so many advantages in the start that no really just comparison was possible.

The two great branches of the Anglo-Saxon family are worthy of each other. America has done her toilsome task of building from new foundations in a wilderness and in the midst of the most formidable difficulties with incomparable thoroughness and speed. The wealth that has rewarded her pains was lodged in and beneath her soil with great profusion by nature. She has not been spoiled by success; riches have not relaxed her energies moral, mental, or physical; she has sought fundamental political truths and been, on the whole, thoroughly loyal to it when found. She has emphatically asserted the dignity of labor as against the European aristocratic customs that degraded it. She inherited the institution of servitude for one race and has, at great cost, repudi

LIBERAL REFORMS AND THE ARISTOCRACY.

743

ated it, and otherwise made such liberal progress as the imperfections of human nature permitted. She has done singularly well and is likely to do still better and make a much more impressive showing in the future.

But England was not to be outdone in the field of energy and enterprise. Many of its liberal reforms have gone far to secure the most important rights of manhood, and constituted it a virtual republic; and if its aristocratic classes exert a very large influence in its affairs still, furnishing a great proportion of its officials and leaders in all departments of government and politics, it is chiefly because they identify themselves with the principal interests of the people and the welfare of the country. They do not so much resist the leveling democratic influences of the time, as seek to maintain their ascendency by becoming more worthy and capable and laboring to level the people up to their own standard of character and mental breadth. They are, therefore, justly respected and esteemed beyond the corresponding class of any other country in the world, at any period. They are an ennobling and useful force in English society and the State, adding to the strength of the latter, to the dignity of the former, and furnishing a high standard of excellence to the world. They, naturally, have exerted a strong influence on the highest classes of other countries. In the last century it was often too justly complained that dignity of birth and social station was regarded by the noble and royal classes of European countries as an excuse for the want of most other claims to respect and veneration; and, if this has generally ceased to be so in all Europe, it is largely due to the example set by the English nobility and gentry. Thus England has known how to keep the lead of modern progress, contributing not a little, in a thousand important ways, to American improvement up to the present time.

English statisticians have, in recent years, undertaken to sum up the material progress of the Home Islands as rep

resented by successive accumulations of wealth. One of these periodical summaries presented the points previously dwelt on, in January, 1878, so impressively that the general facts are extracted from it. It is that of Mr. Robert Giffen, and is accompanied with a table showing the increase of population and wealth of the United States for the same time. The summary of England's wealth is based on official data of 1874-5. The collective property of the people and Government of Great Britain, at that time, was estimated as at least eight thousand five hundred million pounds sterling; which, at $5 to the pound, would be forty-two thousand five hundred million dollars. The estimate of the United States Census, in 1870, for that country, in which it was given in dollars of the then depreciated currency, was about two-thirds of that sum, or thirty thousand million.

A like estimate of English wealth was made in 1865 by a different, but eminent statistician, and from similar data. The amount then stood at thirty thousand five hundred million dollars—a gain of twelve thousand million dollars in ten years. This is a vast sum, indeed, although nominally the United States gained by the official showing of the Census, between 1860 and 1870, about two thousand million dollars more, in spite of four years of civil war and waste. The discount on the paper dollar of the Republic at that time would make its gain nearly four hundred million less than that of England-yet the gain during the next five years was much greater than at any other period, and the gain from 1865 to 1875, the period on which the increase in England was computed, must have been at least equal, and probably considerably larger, for it was, during those years, in the full flush of the most rapid and comprehensive development of its virgin

resources.

The personal property of the more prosperous part of the people that has borne the burden of taxation in England has been computed by a third statistician to have increased between the years 1814 and 1845, as follows:

The later authorities make this portion of English wealth $17,500,000 000, nearly, in 1865, and in 1875 nearly $25,000,000,000. Thus it is seen that the increase in this division of the property of England during one decade was much more. than all the personal property of Englishmen at the close of the long European war in 1814, and three-fourths of the whole as late as 1841. It was after 1850, when the gold of California and Australia had increased the working capital of the world so remarkably, that a colossal expansion of business activity and the period of immense profits commenced. Railroads and Telegraphs furnished means for any desirable activity in home industry and trade, and the steam vessel, submarine telegraph and railways in other countries furnished the opening England needed in the foreign world for the vast extension of her commerce and the full use of her machinery, laborers and capital in manufacturing profitably at home.

Great Britain emerged from the European and last American wars in 1815 with a Public Debt of about four thousand five hundred million dollars, which has been reduced by refunding and payment to something less than four thousand millions. This was a vast burden to be borne during the fifty years that passed while the country was organizing and expanding its great industries. The property of the people, on which this was a first mortgage, was about eleven thousand million dollars. The liabilities were therefore more than a third of the assets. This debt was almost entirely invested or due at home, and the interest on it was promptly paid year by year. In 1815 the annual income of the people from their then capital is stated to have been about $450,000,000, about

one-third of which was required to meet the interest of the debt. At the present time (or in 1875) the annual income from capital is more than $2,225,000,000, and the interest charge of the debt is about $105,000,000, or one twentysecond part. The people earn more per head of the popula tion, and are in a much better situation every way, both as to present and the future, from increased mental, technical and material resources in many ways, aside from the accumulations of income, by twenty-two times.

Thus it is seen that the burden of the debt and the cost of government with all its increased outlays for the welfare of commerce, for sanitary purposes and for education, dwindles constantly in proportion to the private resources of the people. The laboring population is better lodged and fed, while relieved of an incalculable amount of drudgery by the universal use of machinery where it is possible to employ it, with shorter hours of employment and a constant influx of new ideas and stimulus to thought.

The increase of property from 1865 to 1875 was about 40 per cent and its increase per head of population was about 27 per cent. So our statistician declares that the nation might lose one-fourth of its property and still be as rich as it was in 1865. There is, therefore, an immense margin for fluctuations and changes without seriously damaging the resources of the people. Those resources have been proved, by this vast prosperity of a portion of a century, to lie largely in the mind and skilled energy of the race. It may be said that all branches of this race have been at least proportionately prosperous when separated from the Mother Country and managing for themselves, whether in colonies, as in Canada and Australia, or in entire independence, as in the United States.

We have seen how this independent stock improved, both in quality and measure, in the Republic, and the more completely it leaves behind the embarrassments that caused, and were caused by, the Civil War the stronger grows the evi