It is among the salaried class particularly that this evil exists. Perhaps the cause springs from the way in which they earn their livelihood. Money comes to them regularly and surely; they see no reason why it should cease, and so give less attention to strict economy than the man whose success depends upon the care and thrift with which he lives. Their future promotion depends upon their faithfulness, not upon their economy, so that often a man of moderate salary keeps a more expensive establishment than a man of moderate wealth. In the latter case future business advancement depends upon the amount he can save to invest, in the former simply upon his sticking to his work. Salaried people too often live like school boys upon their annual allowance. Whatever the cause, there is a large class of people among us much inferior to what they might be, both in usefulness and ability, simply from the wholly selfish expenditures of their incomes.
One of the careless outcries of dissatisfied persons is that the “rich are growing richer and the poor poorer.” This is half true. The rich are growing richer—and so, too, are the poor. The wealth of the world has been enormously increased, and all classes have profited by it. Even paupers fare better at public expense than they did fifty years ago. Steam has multiplied the world’s wealth. The increase is most conspicuous in the bank accounts of the rich. But the poor live in better houses, have better food and clothing, and get a good many things once considered luxuries. Doubtless some who cry “the poor are growing poorer,” have an honest fear that the tendency of things is to crush down into bitter poverty all but the few rich. They see the growth of large fortunes, but they fail to see the greater growth of general wealth, nor do they stop to figure out the problem. For example: Suppose Vanderbilt has $150,000,000. Then suppose it divided among 50,000,000 of people. We should get just _three dollars apiece_! Suppose that the very rich of the country are equal in wealth to twenty Vanderbilts—a very large estimate. Then, their united wealth, if distributed, would give us only _sixty dollars apiece_! That is the most we could get out of dividing up the big piles of wealth. Any one sees that it would not pay to divide. The rich have not a great deal of our money in their pockets—if they have any. For, an honest inquiry will show that the general average of wealth, and of all that wealth brings to us, is higher by a much larger proportion than that sixty dollars apiece represents. The worst view we can possibly take of it is that we have paid sixty dollars apiece, out of a vast increase in wealth, to men who have managed great enterprises that have enriched us all. _Perhaps_ these men have taken it all for nothing. Nobody believes it; but suppose they have. Then we have still obtained a great gain at small cost. We get, on the average, twice as much for our labor as people did fifty years ago. We live in more comfort than people used to do. We are not growing poorer. We raise here no question of monopolies. Our point now is that the poor are not growing poorer, but richer—that there is no such tendency at work in modern society as the one honestly feared by many—this piling up of all wealth in few hands. Steam is not an aristocrat, but a plain Republican who impartially helps us all when we help ourselves.