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continental Europe where the Protestant revolutions did not take hold, neither did the revolution in landownership occur, and vast landholdings remained concentrated either in the monasteries or with seminoble patrons. These lands were called latifundia in Spain, in eastern Europe and, in time, in the New World countries. I was on the scene in several countries when some of the latifundia were broken up and tillable lands distributed to the peasants—it occurred in Mexico when I worked there—but even today in some nations in Latin America, such as Argentina, and in certain parts of eastern Europe the great estates remain undivided.
    Why is the situation of medieval Europe applicable to our situation today in the United States? Certainly vast Church holdingsnever became an aspect of our land management. Indeed, in 1862 during our Civil War, our Congress passed three extraordinary acts that literally gave away to private farmers and others the latifundia that our nation had accumulated. The Homestead Act gave worthy settlers free farmland; the Morrill Act set aside huge tracts of good land to finance agricultural colleges that charged minimal or even no student fees; and, in the same years, Congress quietly gave to the railways that had been inching their way westward enormous grants of free land to be used by them to encourage settlement in the West. I judge these three laws to have been among the wisest ever passed by our Congress, and I believe they helped us to avoid the radical solutions to landownership that so frequently tore Europe apart.
    But did we completely escape problems similar to those created by
Le Mortmain de l’Église
? Not at all. Our indecent concentrations of power have occurred not in landownership but in the ownership of other forms of our nation’s tangible wealth. In the 1520s England and Germany faced revolution of one kind or another; now, nearly five hundred years later, the United States is heading down the path toward its own version of revolution.
    As American wealth has been accumulating in fewer pockets, the salaried workers of the huge middle class have watched their incomes remain static or even decline. The bottom third of society has slid ever closer to the poverty level, while those already in poverty have found no way to work themselves out of it. In the 1980s legal government policies were established with but one apparent objective: to enable the rich to grow even richer while the poor were pushed to ever-lower rungs on the economic ladder. The 1980s were a decade of shame.
    The figures of inherited and accumulated wealth that I listed at the beginning of this chapter are interesting and indicative of amajor problem in our society, but even more meaningful to the average observer are the grotesque amounts of yearly income being acquired today by many of our nation’s new millionaires. A small sampling of these includes:
    Contemporary Yearly Income, Including in Some Cases Bonuses and Stock Options

    Contrast the above incomes with:

    T here is a vast psychological difference between the first table, which shows accumulated wealth and inherited fortunes, and this small sampling of contemporary yearly incomes. Many of the names in the first list are those of historic figures who accumulated their fortunes in the distant past. The modern citizendoes not envy them their good fortune; it happened so long ago and there is nothing we can do about it.
    But the names in the second list are our contemporaries. Many could be the man or woman next door, some of them relatively young, and their excessive incomes become a matter of moment. Although we can see lasting proof of the socially desirable ways in which many of the past inheritors of great wealth converted their money into commendable foundations, we have little proof as to how these newly rich will distribute theirs. We catch fleeting glimpses of this or that celebrity’s making a gift to a school or to a movement that has social