People's Pilot, Volume 6, Number 19, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 29 October 1896 — A Stupendous Fact. [ARTICLE]

A Stupendous Fact.

The assessed valuation recorded in the great national ledger standing to our credit is about $65,000,000,000. Our population is 62,500,000, and by some means, by some device, by some machination, by some incantation, honest or otherwise, by some process that cannot be defined, less than a two-thousandth part of our population have obtained possession (and have kept out of the penitentiary in spite of the means they adopted to acquire it) of more than onehalf of the entire accumulated wealth of the country.—John J. Ingalls in the United States Senate, Jan. 14, 1891.