But a still more extraordinary conclusion emerges from the facts we have examined. Of the 1,100,000 income tax payers, 820,000 are persons with incomes over £160 and not exceeding £700. The aggregate income of these 820,000 persons we estimated at £275,000,000 (page 39), and the estimate is a liberal one. By subtraction from the total income of the income tax classes (£909,000,000) we see that the 280,000 rich persons with over £700 per annum possess an aggregate income of £634,000,000 per annum. The facts are clearly shown in the following table and in the diagram which forms the frontispiece of this volume:
RICHES, COMFORT, AND POVERTY, 1908
| Distribution of the National Income as between (1) those with £700 per annum and upwards; (2) those with £160 to £700 per annum; and (3) those with not more than £160 per annum. | |||
| Number. | Income. | ||
| Riches | |||
| Persons with Incomes of £700 per annum and upwards and their families, 280,000 × 5 | 1,400,000 | £634,000,000 | |
| Comfort | |||
| Persons with Incomes between £160 and £700 per annum and their families, 820,000 × 5 | 4,100,000 | 275,000,000 | |
| Poverty | |||
| Persons with Incomes of less than £160 per annum and their families | 39,100,000 | 935,000,000 | |
| 44,500,000 | £1,844,000,000 | ||
Thus, to the conclusion that one-half of the entire income of the nation is enjoyed by but about 12 per cent. of its population, we must add another even more remarkable, viz.: that more than one-third of the entire income of the United Kingdom is enjoyed by less than one-thirtieth of its people.
The broad outlines thus drawn I shall not attempt to amplify, for, as will be gathered from the nature of the available material, such amplification would be of little value. Nor would any useful purpose be served by any arbitrary division of our population into "upper," "middle," and "working" classes. The three divisions of population at which we have arrived, although arbitrary, have naturally arisen in the course of our inquiry, and with some propriety we may term them respectively the Rich Classes, the Comfortable Classes and the Poor Classes.
The great fact emerges that the enormous annual income of the United Kingdom is so badly distributed amongst us that, out of a population of 44,500,000, 39,000,000 are "poor" in the sense that their incomes do not exceed £160 a year. It is no longer incredible that in a population of 44,500,000 people, enjoying an aggregate income of £1,844,000,000, there exist "30 per cent. living in the grip of perpetual poverty." When we realize that 39,000,000 out of our 44,500,000 are poor, measured by a very modest standard of income, the statistics of Booth and Rowntree cease to surprise us. In analysis, the United Kingdom is seen to contain a great multitude of poor people, veneered with a thin layer of the comfortable and the rich.
It will be of interest to compare the above statistics with those which appeared in "Riches and Poverty," edition 1905. The statement then presented was based on the Inland Revenue figures of 1903-4, and the frontispiece bore the heading "British Incomes in 1904." For the purposes of comparison, the 1905 edition figures may be attributed to 1903, since the fiscal year 1903-4 is as to nine months in 1903. Similarly, the figures arrived at in the above pages may be dated 1908, an interval of five years separating the two investigations.
The following is the comparison arrived at, after adjustment of the earlier figures by raising the estimated number of income tax payers in 1903 from 1,000,000 to 1,050,000, for the reasons given on page 38.
DISTRIBUTION OF BRITISH INCOMES