MONEYED MEN.

Hauraki Plains Gazette, Volume XXXVIII, Issue 5194, 21 October 1927, Page 4

MONEYED MEN.

FORTUNES IN AMERICA.

LESS PUBLICITY IN ENGLAND. The difference between America and Britain is that America’s richest men make motor-cars, and Britain’s) make beer. This shows us that each nation has its own way of spending its laisure.

The late Lord Iveagh, head of Guinness’s, brewery in Dublin, who has just died, leaving an estate of £20,000,000, is described in the cables (states the Wellington Dominion) as having been Ireland’s richest man, and England’s second richest. This raises the interesting conundrum of who is England’s richest man, a matter on which the cable correspondent leaves the public to speculate. Sir John Leigh, a Manchester millionaire, who backed the “Pall Mall Gazette,” until it ceased publication some years back, was reputqd to be worth fourteen millions,, and the head of the Berry family of South Wales, who controls about fifty public companies, was described, a year or two back as being much richer still. British newspapers: do not discuss the size, of the fortunes possessed by living persons with anything like the same freedom that Americans ones do, and there is not much interest in the United States in the British millionaire fortunes, as the biggest are insignificant compared with America’s biggest. Mr J. D. Rockfeller and Mr Henry Ford, for example, are both credited with being worth £100,000,000 at the leiast. A year or two back the amount paid in income tax by everybody in America was made available for public inspection, and the newspapers all over the country immediately gave the figures for all their local leading lights, and the bigness (or smallest) of whose income tax return was adjudged a matter of public interest. The returns showed the Ford Motor Company as having net taxable profits of £23,000,000 fpr the year, which sum, apparently was at the disposal of the two shareholders, Messrs Henry and Edsel Ford. Mr J. D. Rockfeller, junior, paid £1,255,534 in tax —a sum equal to about half ,his inc’ome for the; year. In the fabulousi figureis of American finance, the high-bracket boys with their million-dollar incomes now number over 280. The term millionaire, which in America once indicated a man possessing a million dollars, is now commonly uspd to denote a man with an income of a million dollars a year—that, is, £200,000 a year, a great American lawyer some years back asserted that the only one thing more timid than one million dollars wasi two million dollars. The multi-millionaires, according to the “American Mercury ” are a fearsome; lot, restrained restricted, weighted down by their wealth, and for ever trembling lest in some mysterious way it may melt away. The two richest men in American politics are Mr Andrew Mellon, Secretary of the Treasury, who is credited with the possession of £50,000,000, and Senator James Couzens, of Michi-' gan, who put all he,.had—£2oo (and. £2O of it borrowed) —into the Ford concern at the; sitart, and was bought out by Mr Ford twenty-one years later.for £6,000,000. It is said that Mr Couzens carried the Ford cheque round in his pock for a week showing it to people, and having a good time, until somebody figured out that he was losing 14 dollars a minute in interest. After that he reluctantly put it in the bank. It is said that Mr Mellon and Mr Couzens. between them probably have more money than all the United States Cabinet, the Judges of the Supremo Court, and all the .Senate (excepting, Senator Dujpont), with probably most of the members of the House of Representatives thrown in.