WEALTH OF NATIONS. Writers on economics distinguish capital from wealth by including in capital only those commodities which are susceptible to reproduction or are employed as agents in reproduction, as land, timber, fisheries, rivers, roads, canals, ships, carriages, money, telegraphs, etc. . The distinc tion might be useful if it were generally adopted; for a vast amount of capital is sunk in objects which are apparently non-productive, as temples, monuments, statues, pictures, musi cal instruments, and generally all artistic prod ucts. But as a matter of fact the distinction is not generally adopted, so that its utility is far from being convincing. No tax assessors, census canvassers nor lenders of money have adopted it. For this reason national capital and national wealth will, in the present article, be treated as synonymous.
Before the opening of the 17th century, a date which corresponds with the colonization of America, but few attempts were made to estimate the wealth of a nation, the rate of its growth, its relation to population, to the cur rent rate of interest or to the local and variable character of the measure (money) which was necessarily employed to compute it. The prac tical importance of these relations were left to the researches of a later age. Yet at the very opening of the century arose a genius who, suspecting the significance of these relations, laid the foundations for every economical work which in treating these subjects has commanded the respect of science. This was Giovanni (John) Botero, a Jesuit, and the author of (Ragione di Stato,) or The Wealth of Na tions,' of which an English translation by Rob ert Paterson appeared in 1606. Botero was followed by Mariana in Spain, Sully in France and Sir Charles D'Avenant in England, to the last of whom we are indebted for the earliest computations concerning the wealth of England, France and Holland; all of which computa tions relate proleptically to the quarter of a century preceding the accession of Charles I in 1625.
England — Great Britain — United King a later period Sir Charles D'Avenant estimated the population, value of real estate and current "specie° of England, whether in the treasury or in circulation, for the year 1600, as follows: For the real estate, £72,000,000; specie, £4,000,000; conservative figures. From these data a comprehensive estimate has been compiled, as follows: Year 1600, population, 5,000,000; wealth, real and personal, f200,000, 000; money (coins and exchequer tallies), L5,000,000. Upon the scattered but useful data
of Sir Charles, strengthened by the almost con temporaneous estimates of Sir William Petty and others, Gregory King compiled the first contemporaneous estimate of the wealth of England in 1688, which he fixed at about £600, 000,000, equal to about 3,000,000,000 Spanish dollars of that period; population, 7,700,000. From that time onward the progress of wealth in the United Kingdom has been computed as follows: Out of 50 known cadastres relating to the wealth of the British isles, those above have been selected on account of their dates as illus trating the progress of wealth in equal periods of time and because they are practically from the same source: a political economist and statistician of the British Board of Trade. The advance during the century, from 1700 to 1800, appears to have been about two and one half times; from 1800 to 1850 two and one half times in 50 years; from 1850 to 1875 nearly twice in 25 years; and •rom 1875 to 1900 only 14 per cent in 25 years. The remarkable de crease in the progress of wealth and therefore of profits marked by the declining rate of in terest on investments which prevailed from 1875 to 1900 has been attributed by British econo mists to the loss of profits in trade occasioned by German rivalry, especially in the woolens and iron and steel trades.
France.— Turning from Great Britain to France, although scattered data may be gleaned from the memoirs of Sully, Colbert, Turgot and Necker, no comprehensive cadastre of the wealth of France appears to have been made before Arthur Young and the other economists of the Revolutionary period; from which time to the present there exist some twenty-odd com putations. From these have been selected the following ones, as illustrative of the progress of wealth in about equal divisions of time: The progress of national wealth in France exhibits a rise, from 1789 to 1815, of about 50 per cent; 1815-40, about 60 per cent; and I840-65, about 50 per cent ; 1865-90 (period of the Franco-Prussian War), a fall to about 37 per cent; and 1890-1914, a fall to 20 per cent; for which there has no adequate ex planation except a decrease in the profits of trade.