◆¹ But we must not be content with comparing our national income with itself. Let us compare it also with the incomes of other countries; and let it in all cases be understood that the comparison is between the income as related to the respective populations, and not between the absolute totals. We will begin with France. It is estimated that, within the last hundred and ten years, the income of France has, relatively to the population, increased more than fourfold. A division of the income in 1780 would have given _six pounds_ a head to everybody: a similar division now would give everybody _twenty-seven pounds_. And yet the income of France, after all this rapid growth, is to-day twenty-one per cent less than that of the United Kingdom. Other comparisons we shall find even more striking. Relatively to the respective populations, the income of the United Kingdom exceeds that of Norway in the proportion of _thirty-four_ to _twenty_; that of Switzerland, in the proportion of _thirty-four_ to _nineteen_; that of Italy, in the proportion of _thirty-four_ to _twelve_; and that of Russia, in the proportion of _thirty-four_ to _eleven_. The comparison with Italy and Russia brings to light a remarkable fact. Were all the property of the upper classes in those countries confiscated, and the entire incomes distributed in equal shares, the share of each Russian would be fifty per cent less, and of each Italian forty per cent less than what each inhabitant of the United Kingdom would receive from a division of the income of its wage-earning classes only. We find, therefore, that if we take equal populations of men,—populations, let us say, of a million men each,—either belonging to the same nation at different dates, or to different civilised nations at the same date, that the incomes produced by no two of them reach to the same amount; but that, on the contrary, the differences between the largest income and the others range from twenty to two hundred per cent. [Sidenote ◆1 The causes of these differences in income are not differences of race,] ◆¹ Now what is the reason of this? Perhaps it will be said that differences of race are the reason. That may explain a little, but it will not explain much; for these differences between the incomes produced by equal bodies of men are not observable only when men are of different races; but the most striking examples,—namely, those afforded by our own country and France—are differences between the incomes produced by the same race during different decades—by the same race, and by many of the same individuals. [Sidenote ◆1 Nor of soil or climate,]