| Finance | 20,000,000
50 | George W. Vanderbilt | Railroads | 20,000,000
51 | Fred W. Vanderbilt | do | 20,000,000
| | +----------------
| Total | | $3,295,000,000
-----+-----------------------+----------------+----------------

"It will thus be seen that fifty-one persons in the United States,
with a population of nearly 90,000,000 people, own approximately one
thirty-fifth of the entire wealth of the United States. The
Statistical Abstract of the United States, 29th number, 1906, prepared
under the direction of the Secretary of Commerce and Labor of the
United States, gives the estimated true value of all property in the
United States for that year at $107,104,211,917.

"Each of the favored fifty-one owns a wealth of somewhat more than
$64,600,000, while each of the remaining 89,999,950 people get $1,100.
No one of these fifty-one owns less than $20,000,000, and no one on
the average owns less than $64,600,000. Men owning from $1,000,000 to
$20,000,000 are no longer called rich men. There are approximately
4,000 millionaires in the United States, but the aggregate of their
holdings is difficult to obtain. If all their holdings be deducted
from the total true value of all the property in the United States,
the average share of each of the other 89,995,000 people would be less
than $500.

"John Jacob Astor is reputed to have been the first American
millionaire, although this is a matter impossible to decide. It is
also claimed that Nicholas Longworth, of Cincinnati, the great
grandfather of Congressman Longworth, was the first man west of the
Allegheny Mountains to amass a million. It is difficult to prove
either one of these propositions, but they prove that the age of the
millionaire in the United States is a comparatively recent thing. In
1870 to own a single million was to be a very rich man; in 1890 it
required at least $10,000,000, while to-day a man with a single
million or even ten millions is not in the swim. To be enumerated as
one of the world's richest men you must own not less than
$20,000,000."

I am perfectly serious when I suggest that the slaves of riches are
just as much to be pitied as the slaves of poverty. No man need envy
Mr. Rockefeller, for example, because he has something like six
hundred millions of dollars, an annual income of about seventy-two
millions. He