Mr. Lucien Sanial, in a most careful analysis of the census for 1900, shows that, classified according to occupations, 250,251 persons possessed $67,000,000,000, out of a total of $95,000,000,000 given as the national wealth; that is to say, 0.9 per cent of the total number in all occupations owned 70.5 per cent of the total national wealth. The middle class, consisting of 8,429,845 persons, being 29.0 per cent of the total number in all occupations, owned $24,000,000,000, or 25.3 per cent of the total national wealth. The lowest class, the proletariat, consisting of 20,393,137 persons, being 70.1 per cent of the total number in all occupations, owned but $4,000,000,000, or 4.2 per cent of the total wealth. To recapitulate: Of the 29,073,233 persons ten years old and over engaged in occupations,
| 0.9 per cent own | 70.5 per cent of total wealth. |
| 29.0 per cent own | 25.3 per cent of total wealth. |
| 70.1 per cent own | 4.2 per cent of total wealth. |
Startling as these figures are, it will be evident upon reflection that they do not adequately represent the amount of wealth concentration. The occupational basis is not quite satisfactory as applied to the richest class. It serves for the proletarian class, of course, and for a very large part of the middle class. In these classes, as a rule, the occupied persons represent wealth ownership. But this is by no means true of the richest class. In this class we have a very considerable proportion of the wealth owned by unoccupied persons, such as the wives rich in their own right, children and other unoccupied members of families rich by inheritance. Mr. Henry Laurens Call, in a paper read before the American Association for the Advancement of Science, at Columbia University, at the end of 1906, made these figures the basis of the startling estimate that one per cent of our population own not less than ninety per cent of our total wealth.
There is a peculiarity of modern capitalism which enables the great capitalists to control vastly more wealth than they own. Take any group of large capitalists, and it will be found that they control a much greater volume of capital than they own. The invested capital of a multitude of small investors is in their keeping, and they can and do use it for purposes of their own. Thus we have a concentration of capitalist control which goes far beyond the concentration of ownership. And this concentration of the essential control of the capital of a country becomes more and more important each year. It is recognized to-day that the most important capitalist is not he who himself owns the greatest amount of capital, but he who controls the greatest amount, quite irrespective of its ownership.
The growth of immense private fortunes is an indisputable evidence of the concentration of wealth. In 1854 there were not more than twenty-five millionaires in New York City, their total fortunes aggregating $43,000,000. There were not more than fifty millionaires in the whole of the United States, their aggregate fortunes not exceeding $80,000,000. To-day there are several individual fortunes of more than $80,000,000 each. New York City alone is said to have over two thousand millionaires, and the United States more than five thousand. By a curious mental process, the New York World, when the first edition of this little book appeared, sought to prove in a labored editorial that the increase of millionaires tended to prove an increasing diffusion of wealth rather than the contrary. It is hardly worth while, perhaps, making any reply to such puerility. Every student knows that the multimillionaire is only possible as a result of the concentration of wealth, that such fortunes are realized by the absorption of numerous smaller ones. Further, it is only necessary to add that all the millionaires of 1854, together with the half millionaires, owned not more than about $100,000,000 out of the total wealth, which was at that time something like $10,000,000,000. In other words, they owned not more than one per cent of the wealth of the country. In 1890, when the wealth of the country was slightly more than $65,000,000,000, Senator Ingalls could quote in the United States Senate a table showing that the millionaires and half millionaires of that time, 31,100 persons in all, owned $36,250,000,000, or just fifty-six per cent of the entire wealth of the United States.[114] Professor Ely accepts the logic of the statistical data gathered in Europe and the United States, and says "such statistics as we have ... all indicate a marked concentration of wealth, both in this country and Europe."[115]
VII
Summing up, we may state the argument of this chapter very briefly as follows: The Socialist theory is that competition is self-destructive, and that the inevitable result of the competitive process is to produce monopoly, either through the crushing out of the weak by the strong, or the combination of units as a result of a conscious recognition of the wastes of competition and the advantages of coöperation. The law of capitalist development, therefore, is from competition and division to combination and concentration. As this concentration proceeds, a large class of proletarians is formed on the one hand, and a small class of capitalist lords on the other, an essential antagonism of interests existing between the two classes. Petty industries may continue to exist, though, upon the whole, the tendency is toward their extinction. In certain industries, their number may even increase, but their relative importance is constantly decreasing. While Socialism does not preclude the continued existence of small private industry or business, it does require and depend upon the development of a large body of concentrated industry, monopolies which can be transformed into social monopolies whenever the people may decide so to transform them. These conditions are being fulfilled in the evolution of our economic system.
The interindustrial and international trustification of industry shows a remarkable fulfillment of the law of capitalist concentration which the Socialists were the first to formulate; the existence of petty industries and businesses, or their numerical increase even, being a relatively insignificant matter compared with the enormous increase in large industries and businesses, and their share in the total volume of industry and commerce. In agriculture, concentration, while it does not proceed so rapidly or directly as in manufacture and commerce, and while it takes directions and forms unforeseen by the Socialists of a generation ago, proceeds surely nevertheless. Along with this concentration of capital and industry proceeds the concentration of wealth into proportionately fewer hands. While a certain diffusion of wealth takes place through the mechanism of capitalist concentration, by developing a new class of highly salaried officials, and enabling numerous small investors to own shares in great industrial and commercial corporations, it is not sufficient to balance the expropriation which goes on in the competitive struggle, and it is true that a larger proportion of the national wealth is owned by a minority of the population than ever before, that minority being proportionately less numerous than ever before. Further, the peculiar financial organization of modern capitalist society enables the ruling capitalists to control and use to their own advantage the wealth of others invested in industrial and commercial corporations. Thus to the concentration of ownership must be added the concentration of control, which plays an increasingly important part in capitalist economics.
Whatever defects there may be in the Marxian theory, as outlined by Marx himself, and whatever modifications of his statement of it may be rendered necessary by changed conditions, in its main and essential features it has successfully withstood all the criticisms which have been directed against it. Economic literature is full of prophecies, but in its whole range there is not an instance of prophecy more literally and abundantly fulfilled than that which Marx made concerning the trend of capitalist development. And Karl Marx was not a prophet—he but read clearly the meaning of certain facts which others had not learned to read, the law of social dynamics. That is not prophecy, but science.