Mr. Robert Giffen, the head of the Statistical Department of
the Board of Trade, read a very striking paper before the Statis- tical Society on Tuesday on the "Accumulation of Capital in England," in which he showed that the increase on the income of the country assessed to income-tax between 1865 and 1875 was no less 2175,000,000, which was equivalent to 44 per cent. of the income assessed in 1865. Mr. Giffen argued, then, that if with- in the last year or two we had ceased to save and begun to trench on our capital, as a recent letter of Mr. Rathbone's to the
Economist seems to assume, the change must have been most
sudden and astounding from the enormously rapid saving of the previous years. Mr. Giffen thought this interpretation of the facts advanced by Mr. Rs.thbone quite inadmissible, and accounted for the rapid increase of our imports over our exports, not by the supposition that we were bringing back capital from abroad which had been invested there, but which we now wanted to live upon, but by the greatly increased income from foreign countries to which our vast loans to those coun- tries in former years justly entitle us. But even if we were bringing back capital from abroad, he holds it very improbable that it is brought back for spending, and not for investment. Our home investments are much greater even than our foreign invest- ments, and in all probability investment and saving at home are going on at a much greater rate than reimportation of capital
from abroad. That looks like common-sense, and certainly does not require us to suppose the present crisis so utterly dis- astrous as the theory of Mr. Rathbone would represent it, but as the phenomena of society do not, we think, bear him out in representing it. In spite of the calamitous suspension of the coal and iron industries, there is no sign as yet of wide-spread ruin or of middle-class bankruptcy.
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