d look over
the financiers there. A considerable number of them are fat men. Because
thinkers and workers cannot appreciate financial value, many of them
complain loudly because the fat man sits in an easy chair and reaps the
profits from their efforts. They restlessly agitate for an economic system
which will yield them all the profits from their ideas and labor. They
want to eliminate the capitalist--to condemn the fat man to a choice
between scholarship or working as they work and starvation. They know
human aptitudes so vaguely that they want to turn the corpulent into farm
hands or philosophers and the great mass of lean and bony into financial
rulers.

There is a prevalent notion among the unthinking that capital takes about
four-fifths of the products of labor's hands and keeps it. A committee of
the American Civic Federation, after three years of careful investigation
in industries employing an aggregate of ten million workers, found that
this idea is based upon the assumption that capital gets and keeps all the
gross income from production except what is paid to labor. It leaves out
of account the cost of raw materials, the upkeep of buildings and
machinery, and miscellaneous expenses. When these are subtracted from
gross income, the committee found, labor receives two-thirds of the
remainder in wages and salaries, capital one-third for interest, upkeep of
capital, and profit.

FINANCIER AND JUDGE

With some exceptions, neither the deep thinker nor the hard physical
worker is capable of handling finances. They are lacking in financial
acumen, due, no doubt, to the fact that the thinker is interested chiefly
in the object of his thought, the worker chiefly in the exercise of his
powerful muscles. Neither of them is sufficiently eager for the good
things of life to have a true and unerring sense of financial values. The
lean man is nervous. He is inclined to be irritable; he probably lacks
patience. Therefore, he is not well qualified to judge impartially. The
active, energetic, restless man is not contented to sit quietly for hours
at a time and listen to the troubles of other people. He must get away, be
out of doors, have something to do to exercise those splendid muscles of
his. Therefore, it is left to the fat man to sit upon the bench, to listen
to tiresome details of the woe of those who have had trouble with one
another. Because he is neither nervous nor irritable; because his mind is
at rest; becaus