Page 371 - clra62_0019-(GIPE)

XXIX.
THE WEALTH OF THE EMPIRE, AND HOW IT SHOULD
BE USED. 1
I N view of the present meeting of the British Asso-
ciation the suggestion was made to me by your
President that a discussion might profitably take place
on the wealth of the British Empire, and the uses to
which it can be put. We are apt to think in such matters
of the mother country only, or even of the separate
units of the mother country itself, for the simple reason
that the statistics are not uniform. But as the idea of
imperial unity takes hold there must come the habit of
realising the empire as a whole. and discussing certain
problems from an imperial. and not merely a national
or local point of view. Among these the question of
the use of our imperial wealth ought surely to find a
place.
This is not a statistical paper, but it is necessary to
start with some idea of what the wealth of the em-
pire really is. We are more or less familiar with ideas
of the wealth of the United Kingdom, based mainly
on such data as the income tax and death duty re-
turns, whether the expression of that wealth takes the
form of an aggregation of individual incomes, or the
aggregate of the capitalised value of incomes derived
from capital, plus wealth in other forms. For certain
purposes, notwithstanding the looseness of all such
estimates, it is convenient to have them to our hand,
as they check the vagueness of discqssions where

, Read before the Economics and Statistics Section of the British
Association, held at Southport, September. 1903.
3 6 3