multitude of small investors is in their keeping, and they can and do
use it for purposes of their own. Thus we have a concentration of
capitalist control which goes far beyond the concentration of ownership.
And this concentration of the essential control of the capital of a
country becomes more and more important each year. It is recognized
to-day that the most important capitalist is not he who himself owns the
greatest amount of capital, but he who controls the greatest amount,
quite irrespective of its ownership.

The growth of immense private fortunes is an indisputable evidence of
the concentration of wealth. In 1854 there were not more than
twenty-five millionaires in New York City, their total fortunes
aggregating $43,000,000. There were not more than fifty millionaires in
the whole of the United States, their aggregate fortunes not exceeding
$80,000,000. To-day there are several individual fortunes of more than
$80,000,000 each. New York City alone is said to have over two thousand
millionaires, and the United States more than five thousand. By a
curious mental process, the _New York World_, when the first edition of
this little book appeared, sought to prove in a labored editorial that
the increase of millionaires tended to prove an increasing diffusion of
wealth rather than the contrary. It is hardly worth while, perhaps,
making any reply to such puerility. Every student knows that the
multimillionaire is only possible as a result of the concentration of
wealth, that such fortunes are realized by the absorption of numerous
smaller ones. Further, it is only necessary to add that all the
millionaires of 1854, together with the half millionaires, owned not
more than about $100,000,000 out of the total wealth, which was at that
time something like $10,000,000,000. In other words, they owned not more
than one per cent of the wealth of the country. In 1890, when the wealth
of the country was slightly more than $65,000,000,000, Senator Ingalls
could quote in the United States Senate a table showing that the
millionaires and half millionaires of that time, 31,100 persons in all,
owned $36,250,000,000, or just fifty-six per cent of the entire wealth
of the United States.[114] Professor Ely accepts the logic of the
statistical data gathered in Europe and the United States, and says
"such statistics as we have ... all indicate a marked concentration of
wealth, both in this country and Europe."[115]

VII

Summing