p. 3 | INCREASE OF WEALTH

Pacific Press Publishing Company · Oakland, California · Jul 24, 1901

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 27, No. 30.

INCREASE OF WEALTH.

THREESCORE and ten years ago there were not more than a half dozen millionaires in this country—only two of these sufficiently wealthy to be prominent. The two were John Jacob Astor and Stephen Girard.

At the present time there are nearly if not quite 4,000. More than one-half of these are found in the States of New York, Pennsylvania, and Massachusetts.

The New York Herald of April 28, 1901, gave a list of 3,828 millionaires and multi-millionaires in the United States. Only one is given as resident of this city. There are, however, not less than a half-dozen of reputed millionaires. Doubtless the Herald list as regards the East is approximately correct, but judging from this city there are many throughout the West who have escaped that journal’s ken. It is quite certain that the men of millions in this country exceed 4,000 in number.

These 4,000 men are estimated by the Herald as possessing over $16,000,000,000 (sixteen billion) of the nation’s $81,750,000,000, said to be a fair valuation of the country’s wealth. In other words, on an average each of the 4,000 men possesses $4,000,000, while the 76,000,000 hold $867 each. One two-hundredth part of one per cent.—or one person out of every 20,000—controls one-fifth of the nation’s wealth. Most of these have accumulated these fortunes in the various industries of manufacturing, merchandizing, real estate, railways, steamships, banking, mining, farms, and stock-raising. Twelve per cent. inherited their wealth.

Much of this wealth is combined in various trusts. Wealth to the extent of over two billions, it is said, has been thus organized since the opening of the new century, Jan. 1, 1901. And the latter part of 1900, according to the Saturday Evening Post, the capitalization of various combinations had reached the prodigious sum of over seven billion dollars. The increase the present year has gone on in face of the fact that Congress and twenty-nine States have passed laws expressly to prohibit trusts. Wealth laughs at law. Every commodity of civilization, every thing necessary to life, except sunshine and air (and even these in factories and tenements), is held or controlled by some trust, from the billion-dollar steel trust to match, peanut, and playing-card trusts. It is impossible to estimate the extent of these combinations.

Some of these trusts, through allied companies, control the markets of the world, as for instance, the great Standard Oil Company, reaching out its pipe lines and branches like the feelers and arms of an octopus, crushing and absorbing every independent oil enterprise. The people who consume the oil, who are at the mercy, practically, of one man, pay the profits for the enormous dividends. We are told that the year 1900 added to the wealth of John D. Rockefeller the sum of $150,000,000; William K. Vanderbilt, $25,000,000; J. Pierpont Morgan, $20,000,000; Russell Sage, Hetty Greene, Thomas Lawson, and others from $15,000,000 to $1,000,000. Surely this is the heaping together of treasure, as the prophet declares.