RANDOM NOTES

Dominion, Volume 30, Issue 113, 6 February 1937, Page 8

RANDOM NOTES

Sidelights on Current Events [By Kickshaws.} A salesman at Excelsior Springs, Missouri, declares he will remain chained and padlocked to a radiator in the lobby of an apartment house till a lady who lives there agrees to marrj’ him. Wait till he is chained and padlocked to the lady herself. The chairman of the Ngaio Progressive Association complains that his district is being continually side-tracked on the question of baths. Mothers who are being continually side-tracked by their children on the same question will sympathise. A. lire brigade in lowa, U.S.A., maintains a band consisting entirety of saxophones. That ought to be enough for anj’ fire. » » • If the sum of £50,000 be multiplied by 200, one is confronted with the fact that at one time Rockefeller had to find what to do with an Income of £10,000,000 a year. Certainly, he could not count it, because it would have taken the best part of a year to do so. Experts believe that, after the passing of another half a century, there will be no millionaires left in the world in any country, including the dollar standard millionaires of the United States of America. This, of course, will not affect the wealth of the world. The State does not only collect money from dead millionaires. It helps living ones to spend their income. In the case of English millionaires with an income of £150,000 a year, the State takes just under onehalf every year—9/7 in the pound, to be exact. In the old days income tax did not exist, but there were other taxes that took its place. In the 14th century, for instance, the poll tax was invented. Every unmarried man paid a shilling a year, but ducal bachelors paiJ £l2/10/- a year. Widowers, moreover, were bachelors within the meaning of the Act.

Perhaps one da.v the only specimen of a millionaire it is possible to see will be at some enlightened form of waxworks. Conditions that once made possible the vast accumulations of capital do not exist these days. Rockefeller made bis fortune by cornering oil. Were he a young man to-day, beginning life, he could not repeat himself financially, partly owing to the difficulties he would find in his way, and partly because many of the methods permitted 50 years ago or more have now been made illegal. There is a handicapping system in vogue for millionaires, just as there is for billiard players who discover a sure way of making interminable breaks. In 1896 Rockefeller retired with £40.000,000. In time, the £40,000,000 grew to £200,000,000 by investing the surplus shrewdly. To-daj’ that huge fortune has dwindled, not that it makes the slightest difference to the owner, because he cannot possibly use it all. A fortune of one million at five per cent, delivers an income everj’ year of £50,000.

The mouej- that arrives in the coffers of the State of Great Britain from millionaires departing this life has created so much interest that actuaries at Somerset House now work out every year how long 900 or so millionaires in Britain are likely to live. Thej’ represent a dying species from whom windfalls may not be expected after thej’ have died. In the old days the event of a millionaire dying was looked upon bj’ the State as a lucky gamble. Now the business has been brought to a science. The average of the ages of the millionaires who died the j’ear before are taken and by a calculation of what they left, it is possible to arrive at a figure for the coming year, that is usualy very close to reality. “Clogs to clogs in three generations” they say in Lancashire. Whereas tills was repeatable generation after generation, it looks now as if once the cycle is completed clogs will remain clogs for all time. That is the modern attitude toward millionaires.

A good part of the forthcoming business of the Mortgagors' Relief Courts will no doubt be concerned with the reduction of mortgages on account of the fall in land values. Some of the old land deals in the Wellington area make interesting reading these days. Edward Gibbon 'Wakefield, for example, was only too pleased in 1858 to sell 119 acres of farm land on the way to Porirua for a sum of £2OO. The purchaser was a farmer named Cudby and his partners. Butler and King. The earthquake, in the early days, that raised the land some five or six feet in the Wellington area, did not appear to make any appreciable difference to the value of the land added in this way. To-day the addition ot many thousands of extra acres would add thousands of pounds of valuable land to the Wellington province. It is, however, onty fair to add that there is a property in Nap'er that, according to Government rating, is now worth one penny as a result of the shake in those parts several years ago. The section concerned, except for one twenty-seventh of an acre, fell over the cliff’s edge. The owner put up the remnant of his land for sale at a price of one penny. There were no bids. The figure therefore became the, new valuation. Time alone will tell if it will increase.

While on the subject of land values, there comes a pathetic story from Cape Town about a little land deal tha£ once took place there in the early days. There died in Guildford Workhouse several years ago a man named James Cutterson Pratt Some 50 years before he died he bought the whole of the land on which Johannesburg now stands, an area of 18.000 acres, for tile sum of £350. That land to-day is worth over £20.000.000. Unfortunately, he was deprived of his fortune. When the Boer Republic was declared his property was confiscated by the new Government. The wretched man returned to England penniless. In con trast to this, a newsboy in Tampa. Florida. saved £2O and invested it in what is now known as the "Florida Land Boom.” He turned the land be bought into a profit of £20.000. bought an island with it, built a bridge to it. connecting it with the mainland, and sold out for £3,600,000 before the bridge broke or the boom burst. A fire-mist and a planet. A crystal and a cell. A jelly-fish and a saurian. And caves where the cavemen dwell; Then a sense of law and beauty. And a face turned from the clod— Some call it evolution. And others call it God. —Carruth.