◆1 A legislative division of the national income is not only disappointing in its theoretical results, but practically impossible,
◆¹ We have just seen how disappointing, to those even who would gain most by it, would be the results of an equal division of the national income of this country, and how intolerable to all would be the general conditions involved in it. In doing this, we have of course adopted, for argument’s sake, an assumption which underlies all popular ideas of such a process; namely, that if a Government were only strong enough and possessed the requisite will, it could deal with the national income in any way that might be desired; or, in other words, that the national income is something that could be divided and distributed, as an enormous heap of sovereigns could, according to the will of any one who had them under his fingers. I am now going to show that this assumption is entirely false, and that even were it desirable theoretically that the national income should be redivided, it is not susceptible of any such arbitrary division.
◆1 As will be shown in this chapter.
◆¹ To those who are unaccustomed to reflecting on economic problems, and who more or less consciously associate the qualities of wealth with those of the money in whose terms its amount is stated, I cannot introduce this important subject better than by calling their attention to the few following facts, which, simple and accessible as they are, are not generally known.
◆1 Wealth is utterly unlike money in its divisible qualities.
◆2 The money of the United Kingdom is an imperceptible fraction of its wealth.
◆¹ The capital value of the wealth of the United Kingdom is estimated at something like ten thousand million pounds; but the entire amount of sovereigns and shillings in the country does not exceed a hundred and forty-four million pounds, nor that of the uncoined bullion, a hundred and twenty-two million pounds. That is to say, for every nominal ten thousand sovereigns there does not exist in reality more than two hundred and twenty-six. Were this sum divided amongst the population equally, it would give every one a share of exactly seven pounds. Again, this country produces every year wealth which we express by calling it thirteen hundred million pounds. ◆² The amount of gold and silver produced annually by the whole world is hardly so much as thirty-eight million pounds. If the whole of this were appropriated by the United Kingdom, it would give annually to each inhabitant only ten new shillings and a single new half-sovereign. The United Kingdom, however, gets annually but a tenth of the world’s money, so its annual share in reality is not so much as four million pounds. Accordingly, that vast volume of wealth which we express by calling it thirteen hundred million pounds, has but four million pounds of fresh money year by year to correspond to it. That is to say, there is only one new sovereign for every new nominal sum of three hundred and twenty-five.
◆1 The nature of wealth, as a whole, is quite misconceived by most people;
◆2 As we see by the metaphors they use to describe it.
◆¹ Wealth as a whole, therefore, is something so totally distinct from money that there is no ground for presuming it to be divisible in the same way. What is wealth, then, in a country like our own? To some people this will seem a superfluous question. They will say that every one knows what wealth is by experience—by the experience of possessing it, or by the experience of wanting it. And in a certain sense this is true, but not in any sense that concerns us here. In precisely the same sense every one knows what health is; but that is very different from knowing on what health depends; and to know the effects of wealth on our own existence is very different from knowing the nature of the thing that causes them. Indeed, as a matter of fact, what wealth really consists of is a thing which very few people are ever at the trouble to realise; and nothing shows that such is the case more clearly than the false and misleading images which are commonly used to represent it. ◆² The most familiar of these are: “a treasure,” “a store,” “a hoard,” or, as the Americans say, “a pile.” Now any one of these images is not only not literally true, but embodies and expresses a mischievous and misleading falsehood. It represents wealth as something which could be carried off and divided—as a kind of plunder which might be seized by a conquering army. But the truth is, that the amount of existing wealth which can be accurately described, or could be possibly treated in this way, is, in a country like ours, a very insignificant portion; and, were social conditions revolutionised to any serious degree, much of that portion would lose its value and cease to be wealth at all.