Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 77.djvu/66

60 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 corporation 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, polluted 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 partially spoiled article upon an ignorant and unsuspecting public. Sickness, 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 because 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 interference of the church in secular affairs. To-day political chicanery and corruption are the fruits of the interference of big business interests in legislative affairs. The trust has replaced the church as a dangerous meddler in political affairs. And the alliance between capital and the state is as dangerous, as reactionary and as intolerant as was the medieval alliance of church and state. Economic heresy is now almost as bitterly condemned as was religious heresy in earlier centuries.