◆¹ So much, then, being admitted, we shall make our calculations best by starting with the family as our unit, and coming to the individual afterwards. The average family consists of four and a half persons; and the families in the United Kingdom number _eight and a half millions_. _Twelve hundred millions_—the sum we have to divide—would give each family an income of _a hundred and forty pounds_. From this, however, we should have to deduct taxes; and, since if all classes were equal, all would have to be taxed equally,—the amount due from each family would be considerable. Public expenditure, if the State directed everything, would of necessity be larger than it is at present; but even if we assume that it would remain at its present figure, each family would have to contribute at least _sixteen pounds_.[6] Therefore _sixteen pounds_ must be deducted from the _hundred and forty pounds_. Accordingly we have for four and a half persons a net income of _a hundred and twenty-six pounds_. Now these persons would be found to consist on an average of a man and his wife, a youth, a girl, and a half of a baby,—for when we deal with averages we must execute many judgments like Solomon’s,—and if we distribute the income among them in the proportion I just now indicated, the result we shall arrive at will, in round numbers, be this. ◆² The man will have _fifty pounds_, the woman _thirty-six pounds_, the youth _twenty-five pounds_, the girl _twenty-four pounds_, and the half of the infant _five pounds_. And now let us scrutinise the result a little further, and see how it looks in various familiar lights. An equal distribution of the whole wealth of the country would give every adult male about _nineteen shillings and sixpence_ a week, and every adult female about _fourteen shillings_. These sums would, however, be free of taxes; so in order to compare them with the wages paid at present, we must add to them _two shillings and sixpence_ and _two shillings_ respectively, which will raise them respectively to _twenty-two shillings_, and to _sixteen shillings_: ◆³ but a bachelor who is earning the former sum now, or an unmarried woman who is now earning the latter, would neither of them, under any scheme of equal distribution conceivable, come in for a penny of the plunder taken from the rich. They already are receiving all that, on principles of equality, they could claim.