From this table it appears that the period of energetic Imperialism has been coincident with a remarkable growth in the income from external investments. The income from these sources has nearly doubled in the period 1884-1900, while the portion derived from foreign railways and foreign and colonial investments has increased at a still more rapid rate.
These figures only give the foreign income which can be identified as such. To them must be added a large amount of income which escapes these income-tax returns, including considerable sums which would appear as profits of businesses carried on in the United Kingdom, such as insurance companies, investment trusts, and land mortgage companies, many of which derive a large part of their income from foreign investments. How rapid is the growth of this order of investment is seen from the published returns of investments of life insurance companies, which show that their investments in mortgages outside the United Kingdom had grown from about £6,000,000 in 1890 to £13,000,000 in 1898.
Sir R. Giffen estimated the income derived from foreign sources as profit, interest and pensions in 1882 at £70,000,000, and in a paper read before the Statistical Society in March 1899 he estimated the income from these same sources for the current year at £90,000,000. It is probable that this last figure is an underestimate, for if the items of foreign income not included as such under the income-tax returns bear the same proportion to those included as in 1882, the present total of income from foreign and colonial investments should be £120,000,000 rather than £90,000,000. Sir R. Giffen hazards the calculation that the new public investments abroad in the sixteen years 1882-1898 amounted to over £800,000,000, “and though part of the sum may have been nominal only, the real investment must have been enormous.”
Mr. Mulhall gives the following estimate of the size and growth of our foreign and colonial investments since 1862: