On the other hand, it would be a profound mistake to regard the sum shown—£439,000,000—as belonging entirely to manual workers. No small part of the funds of building societies, savings banks, etc., belong to the middle classes, and even professional men do not disdain to purchase houses through building societies.

Additions must be made for the tiny stocks of little shopkeepers and the "furniture" in poor houses, but on the latter account those who know what the furniture of the poor usually consists of will make modest estimates of its value. Its exchange value is almost negligible, and its value in use is that it is a factor in the sordid discomfort of the poor home, being in that respect not unworthy of the ugly walls which enclose it.

Altogether it is probable that we may estimate the total property of the poor at less than £500,000,000 in 1908, and regard this sum as belonging chiefly to a great mass of people, forming by far the greater part of the 39,000,000 persons under the line of Income Tax exemption. Probably about £15,000,000 of this sum passes at death per annum, and only a small part of it, chiefly the house property, comes under review by Somerset House.

With the facts we have reviewed we are in a position to arrive at a just idea of the respective proportions of rich and poor estates. On page 59 will be found a table which shows the nature of those proportions. I have taken the averages of the past five years arrived at in the tables on pages 52-53, and have made a rough division between rich and poor by drawing the line at the possession of property worth £1,000 net capital value.

To give a true idea of the division of deaths in the two classes, it is necessary to make allowance in the rich class for the deaths of the children of the well-to-do. It may be taken that, in addition to the 20,000 adults who die every year possessed of estates worth upwards of £1,000, 7,500 children and young persons die in well-to-do homes. I then place in the upper part of the table the number of deaths remaining after deduction from 683,000 of all the other figures in the table.

In arriving at the amount of property left by the poor I have assumed that of the £15,000,000 of savings estimated as passing at death per annum, £5,000,000 does actually come under review in the first few lines of the table on pages 52-53. The balance, £10,000,000, I have brought into the account as corresponding to the 592,294 deaths in the first line of the table on p. 59.

With these explanations the table will speak for itself, and its tale is a startling one. We see that, drawing the line between the rich and poor arbitrarily at the possession of £1,000, of the 683,000 persons who die in a year, 28,397 die rich or very rich, leaving £259,700,000, while 654,603 die poor or very poor, leaving between them only £29,500,000.

The figures over £10,000 are worth special attention:—

FORTUNES OVER £10,000 EACH (NET)

Year by year, with the regularity of the seasons, about four thousand persons die leaving between them about £200,000,000 out of total estates declared to be worth about £300,000,000.