I will put it in another way, Jonathan, since you are not accustomed to thinking in percentages. Suppose that there were a hundred cows to be divided among the members of the community. According to the scheme of division just described, this is how the division would work out:
| 1 Man would get | 55 Cows for himself | |
| 11 Men would get | 32 Cows among them | |
| 88 Men would get | 13 Cows among them |
When they had divided the cows in this manner they would proceed to divide the wheat, the potato crops, the land, and everything else owned by the community in the same unequal way. I ask you again, Jonathan, what would you think of such a division?
Of course, being a fair-minded man, endowed with ordinary intelligence at least, you will admit that there would be no sense and no justice in such a plan of division, and you doubt if intelligent human beings would submit to it. But, my friend, that is not quite so bad as the distribution of wealth in America to-day is. Suppose that instead of all the members of the little island community being workers, all working equally hard, fairly sharing the work of the community, one man absolutely refused to do anything at all, saying, "I was the first one to get ashore. The land really belongs to me. I am the landlord. I won't work, but you must work for me." And suppose that eleven other men said in like manner. "We won't work. We found the tools, we brought the seeds and the food out of the boats when we came. We are the capitalists and you must do the work in the fields. We will superintend you, give you orders where to dig, and when, and where to stop. You eighty-eight common fellows are the laborers who must do the hard work while we use our brains." And suppose that they actually carried out that plan and then divided the wealth in the way I have described, that would be a pretty good illustration of how the wealth produced in America under our existing social system is divided.
And I ask you what you think of that, Jonathan Edwards. How do you like it?
These are not my figures. They are not the figures of any rabid Socialist making frenzied guesses. They are taken from a book called The Present Distribution of Wealth in the United States, by the late Dr. Charles B. Spahr, a book that is used in most of our colleges and universities. No serious criticism of the figures has ever been attempted and most economists, even the conservative ones, base their own estimates upon Spahr's work. It would be worth your while to get the book from the library, Jonathan, and to read it carefully.
In the meantime, look over the following table which sets forth the results of Dr. Spahr's investigation, Jonathan, and remember that the condition of things has not improved since 1895, when the book was written, but that they have, on the contrary, very much worsened.
SPAHR'S TABLE OF THE DISTRIBUTION OF WEALTH IN THE UNITED STATES
| Class | No. of Families | Per Cent | Average Wealth | Aggregate Wealth | Per Cent |
| Rich | 125,000 | 1.0 | $263,040 | 32,880,000,000 | 54.8 |
| Middle | 1,362,500 | 10.9 | 14,180 | 29,320,000,000 | 32.2 |
| Poor | 4,762,500 | 38.1 | 1,639 | 7,800,000,000 | 13.0 |
| Very Poor | 6,250,000 | 50.0 | |||
| Total | 13,500,000 | 100.0 | $4,800 | $60,000,000,000 | 100.0 |
Now, Jonathan, although I have taken a good deal of trouble to lay these figures before you, I really don't care very much for them. Statistics don't impress me as they do some people, and I would far rather rely upon your commonsense than upon any figures. I have not quoted these figures because they were published by a very able scholar in a very wise book, nor because scientific men, professors of political economy and others, have accepted them as a fair estimate. I have used them because I believe them to be true and reliable.