60 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 
a dual personality as a worker, and thus double his pay check. In the 
matter of market opportunity the opportunity is with capital, not with 
labor. Extra income due to special advantages is capitalized in money, 
not in labor power. 
“Fair” interest and “fair” profits may be manipulated through 
capitalization of special privileges; but “fair” wages can not be so 
acted upon. The man stands out in the open. Fair wages are kept 
down because fair interest and fair profits are so elusive; and because 
rents are concealed under the guise of interest upon concrete capital, 
or of profits due to skilful management. If the capital of the country 
were expressed only in terms of concrete tangible goods, as is proposed 
by the Wisconsin law, the disproportion between fair wages and fair 
profits and interest would be evident. The enormous gains of monopoly 
would then inevitably attract such attention that they would be cut off 
to some extent at least, and the long distance, impersonal and indirect 
form of tribute taking would be reduced; although a scientific basis for 
determining fair wages, interest and profits may not be found. 
But there are other tangible bits of evidence which bring to the 
nostrils of the investigator the musty smell of medievalism. A corpora- 
tion furnishing a municipality with water which is supposed to be taken 
from artesian wells, finds it feasible and perhaps cheaper to introduce, 
into the water mains, without notice to the consumers of the city, pol- 
luted water from a river. As a consequence, sickness and death invade 
many happy homes in the little city. Another company producing a 
food product uses a deleterious preservative to enable it to foist a par- 
tially spoiled article upon an ignorant and unsuspecting public. Sick- 
ness, ill-health, reduced efficiency and even death follow unnoticed in 
the wake of the packages sent broadcast over the land. A railway 
company neglects to guard its street crossings or to protect its trainmen 
pecause of the additional expense connected with such improvements. 
Again, dead and maimed men, women and children are the direct 
results of the policy of the heads of the company. This disregard for 
employees and consumers which is by no means confined to a few 
isolated cases, is not unlike the nonchalance with which the knight and 
baron of the middle ages directed the destruction of the homes and the 
crops of his adversaries and competitors. The toll of the monopolist 
collected in prices made arbitrarily high is not very different from the 
toll exacted at the point of the sword by the robber baron. 
In the medieval period, a multitude of evils resulted from the inter- 
ference of the church in secular affairs. To-day political chicanery and 
uits of the interference of big business interests 
The trust has replaced the church as a dangerous 
And the alliance between capital and the 
reactionary and as intolerant as was the 
Economic heresy is now almost 
lier centuries. 
corruption are the fr 
in legislative affairs. 
meddler in political affairs. 
state is as dangerous, as 
medieval alliance of church and state. 
as bitterly condemned as was religious heresy in ear 
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