94 CHARLES R. FLINT 



have our young men?" While you arc asking the question, 

 those of ability and energy have already started on a career 

 of successful industry. If the student will leave his books 

 and the orator the stump and go to our factories, to our great 

 farms, to our mines, to our lines of railway, they will find 

 ten times as many men receiving over $3,000 per annum as 

 there were thirty years ago. Mr. Schwab, of Pittsburg, is a 

 type. He started as a stake driver of an engineering corps; 

 though under forty years of age, he rose to be president 

 of the largest iron company in the world, and I can point 

 out a hundred successful men to-day where you could not have 

 named ten under old conditions. But it is said, they are 

 dependent. Dependence upon one another is, however, a 

 condition of civilization. The very word civilization implies 

 community life, and community life means mutual dependence. 

 Complete independence is found only in the wigwam of the 

 Indian. There the young man builds his own home, makes 

 his own clothes, gets his own meat, and keeps his bank account, 

 if he has any, in his pocket. The best opportunity he has 

 for distinction is in showing superior prowess in hunting, or 

 superior strength in paddling his own canoe. In civilized 

 life, interdependence is more profitable than independence. 

 But let us not spend more time in considering who will take 

 care of these young men of superior intelligence ; they will take 

 care of themselves. 



3. Let us now consider the interests of the workingman 

 in this economic evolution which has produced the perfect 

 machinery and giant factories, supported by great aggregates 

 of capital represented by shares which enable all to become 

 investors. It is a fundamental fact that the man of superior 

 ability cannot accumulate for himself without giving to the 

 wage earners an opportunity to earn the larger share, and it is 

 always an increasing share. The tendency is to-day to a mini- 

 mum of profits and to a maximum of wages. When profits 

 become abnormal, they invite competition, and are immedi- 

 ately reduced; in that case, the consumer solely is benefited. 

 If they are not sufficiently abnormal to invite competition, 

 then labor demands a larger share of the profit in the form 

 of increased wages, and it is either voluntarily or necessarily 



