The impending crisis : $b conditions resulting from the concentration of wealth in the United StatesBouroff, Basil A.
History
The impending crisis : $b conditions resulting from the concentration of wealth in the United States
Bouroff, Basil A.
Trusts, Industrial; United States -- Economic conditions; Wealth
As to the prosperity, I will say, that a family securing a large amount
of borrowed money or capital at low rates of interest may [SN:
CONDITIONS OF PROSPERITY.] prosper under mortgage by efficiently
applying the capital on its wealth, by efficiently applying the labor
energy of the family members, and, especially, by efficiently applying
hired labor upon its farm or any other kind of property. So that, only
those mortgagor families can have prosperity, which are aided by many
agencies in drawing incomes from their land. While all the poorer
families must be ruined by the mortgages.
As to the argument that we have no establishment of tenancy after the
English fashion of primogeniture, it is enough to refer the reader to
the third chapter of this work, and beg him to understand it well by
reading a second time. For the effects of primogeniture and
dividogenesure are the same, as both principles demand that millions of
individuals should divide the sole results of their applied energy with
the few owners of capital and wealth, or else these millions must starve
without employment. They produce economic slavery in England and in the
United States, where most of the people are now propertyless and
therefore helpless.
Dividogenesure, however, differs from primogeniture by including all
mortgagors into its sphere of oppression.
And it seems to me perfectly naive to assert that “larger and more
varied crops are produced from lessening areas of land throughout [SN:
LOGIC QUEER.] the whole grain-growing section” of the country. For it
really means that the more land the people lose through mortgages, the
better crops they will produce, and hence the best crops must be
produced by them when they lose all the land they formerly owned.
But Mr. Atkinson does not here deal with the fact that more than 64 per
cent of the population in 420 cities and towns, and 77 per cent of it in
the 28 largest cities are also tenants of homes, beside the tenants of
farms he writes about. He does not speak of the fact that the 420 cities
and towns actually belong to less than 24 per cent of their population,
and that the 28 great cities in the United States really belong to less
than 14 per cent of their population; and that the whole population of
the 448 cities and towns are bound, by dividogenesure, to work in one or
other way for the small per cent of their wealthy neighbors, the only
independent population that holds the others in slavery. A dealing with
these tenants would disprove his position. See appendix I.
Mr. G. H. Holmes, writing in the “Annals of the American Academy and
Social Science Quarterly,” gives a more balanced view on the subject. He
says:[109]
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