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_.

But don't you rest your whole faith upon them, Jonathan. If some fine
day a Republican spellbinder, or a Democratic scribbler, tries to
upset you and prove that Socialists are all liars and false prophets,
just tell him the figures are quite unimportant to you, that you don't
care to know just exactly how much of the wealth the richest one per
cent. gets and how little of it the poorest fifty per cent. gets. A
few millions more or less don't trouble you. Pin him down to the one
fact which your own commonsense teaches you, that the wealth of the
country _is_ unequally distributed. Tell him that you _know_,
regardless of figures, that there are many idlers who are enormously
rich and many honest, industrious workers who are miserably poor. He
won't be able to deny these things. He _dare_ not, because they are
_true_.

Ask any such apologist for capitalism what he would think of the
father or mother who took his or her eight children and said: "Here
are eight cakes, as many cakes as there are boys and girls. I am going
to distribute the cakes. Here, Walter, are seven of the cakes for you.
The other cake the rest of you can divide among yourselves as best you
can." If the capitalist defender is a fair-minded man, if he is
neither fool nor liar nor monster, he will agree that such a parent
would be brutally unjust.

Yet, Jonathan, that is exactly how our national wealth is divided up.
One-eighth of the families in the United States do get se