And if there is a change like this in the possession of landed wealth, there is a still more rapid change in the possession of commercial capital. One of the many childish assumptions of Karl Marx was the assumption on which a good deal of his reasoning rests—that the English middle classes of the present century owed their capital and positions to social opportunities which had come to them as the heirs and descendants of the merchants and wealthier sheep-farmers who began to make fortunes four hundred years ago. As a matter of fact by far the larger part of the great commercial businesses and commercial fortunes now existing in this country have been founded during the past hundred, and many within the past fifty years, by men who were the sons of ordinary wage-paid labourers, and who were no more heirs to the men who formed the middle class under the Tudors than they were to the merchants who are celebrated in the _Arabian Nights_. That such is the case is shown with sufficient clearness by the following figures, which refer to commercial incomes during the thirty years which followed the first Great Exhibition. During these years, whilst the population increased by about 30 per cent, fortunes of over ten thousand a year were multiplied by 100 per cent, fortunes of from five to ten thousand by 96 per cent, and fortunes of from five to six hundred by 308 per cent. It is obvious, then, that when a class is augmented in one generation by a number of new members from three to ten times as great as its natural increase would account for, most of its new members must have come to it from some class outside, and have gained their place in it solely by their own exertions. {326} Thus in spite of the permanence which interest gives to wealth, the families that live merely on interest are constantly tending to disappear, and their places are being taken by the men whose exceptional faculties, whose business ability, whose enterprise and strenuous will, actually contribute most to the productive forces of the country. It was observed by J. S. Mill with regard to political government that this “is always in, _or is passing into_, the hands” of the men who are at the time the true repositories of power. In the same way the wealth of any progressive country is always in, or is passing into, the hands of the men who by their own abilities are engaged actively in producing it. {327}