Persons with Incomes between £160 and £700 per annum and their families, 820,000 × 5 4,100,000 275,000,000
Persons with Incomes of less than £160 per annum and their families 39,100,000 935,000,000 ---------- -------------- 44,500,000 £1,844,000,000 ========== ==============
Thus, to the conclusion that one-half of the entire income of the nation is enjoyed by but about 12 per cent. of its population, we must add another even more remarkable, viz.: that _more than one-third of the entire income of the United Kingdom is enjoyed by less than one-thirtieth of its people_.
The broad outlines thus drawn I shall not attempt to amplify, for, as will be gathered from the nature of the available material, such amplification would be of little value. Nor would any useful purpose be served by any arbitrary division of our population into "upper," "middle," and "working" classes. The three divisions of population at which we have arrived, although arbitrary, have naturally arisen in the course of our inquiry, and with some propriety we may term them respectively the Rich Classes, the Comfortable Classes and the Poor Classes.
The great fact emerges that the enormous annual income of the United Kingdom is so badly distributed amongst us that, out of a population of 44,500,000, 39,000,000 are "poor" in the sense that their incomes do not exceed £160 a year. It is no longer incredible that in a population of 44,500,000 people, enjoying an aggregate income of £1,844,000,000, there exist "30 per cent. living in the grip of perpetual poverty." When we realize that 39,000,000 out of our 44,500,000 are poor, measured by a very modest standard of income, the statistics of Booth and Rowntree cease to surprise us. In analysis, the United Kingdom is seen to contain a great multitude of poor people, veneered with a thin layer of the comfortable and the rich.
It will be of interest to compare the above statistics with those which appeared in "Riches and Poverty," edition 1905. The statement then presented was based on the Inland Revenue figures of 1903-4, and the frontispiece bore the heading "British Incomes in 1904." For the purposes of comparison, the 1905 edition figures may be attributed to 1903, since the fiscal year 1903-4 is as to nine months in 1903. Similarly, the figures arrived at in the above pages may be dated 1908, an interval of five years separating the two investigations.