ACCUMULATION OF CAPITAL IN ENGLAND.

Globe, Volume IX, Issue 1270, 13 April 1878, Page 3

ACCUMULATION OF CAPITAL IN ENGLAND.

The “ Spectator ” reports that Mr Robert Giffen, the head of the Statistical Department of the Hoard of Trade, read a very striking paper before the .statistical Society on Tuesday on the “Accumulation of t apital in Fngland,’’ in which he shewed that the increase on the income of the country assessed to income-tax between 1*65 and 1875 was no less than £175 000,000, which was eqnival nt to 44 per cent of the income asse sed in 1865. Mr Gillen argued, then, that if ivithin the last yeador two we had ceased to save and begun to trench on our capital, as a recent letter of Mr Bathbone’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 internrotaticn of the facts advanced by Mr Rathb me quite inadmis sible, and accounted for the rapid increase’ of our imports over our exports, not by the supposition that we were bringing back c+pital 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 w'hich our vast loans to those countries in former years justly entitle ns. Bat 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 investments, 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 disastrous as the theory of Mr Bathbone 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 widespread or rather of middle class bankruptcy.