From the 1901 book, Richard Croker by Alfred Henry Lewis:
And because sundry millionaires have made more millions, they call the country prosperous. Mere wealth in a country doesn’t mean prosperity. It is the distribution of wealth. A community of one thousand souls, and each with fifty thousand dollars, would be an aggregate of fifty million dollars; and it would be a tale to tell of a people prosperous and well content. But a community of one thousand souls, where one had fifty million dollars, and nine hundred and ninety-nine not one dollar among them, would be a den where all the serpents of slavery, ignorance, misery, and degradation would coil and hiss and strike.
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