oes not commonly
occur to the wealthy "professional man," or "prominent merchant," to be
ashamed to add to his yearly thousands a part of the salary justly due
to his female bookkeeper or typewriter, who sits before him all day with
an empty belly in order to have an habilimented back. He has a vague,
hazy notion that the law of supply and demand is mandatory, and that in
submitting himself to it by paying her a half of what he would have to
pay a man of inferior efficiency he is supplying the world with a noble
example of obedience. I must take the liberty to remind him that the
law of supply and demand is not imperative; it is not a statute, but
a phenomenon. He may reply: "It is imperative; the penalty for
disobedience is failure. If I pay more in salaries and wages than I need
to, my competitor will not; and with that advantage he will drive me
from the field." If his margin of profit is so small that he must eke
it out by coining the sweat of his workmen into nickels, I've nothing to
say to him. Let him adopt in peace the motto, "I cheat to eat" I do not
know why he should eat, but Nature, who has provided sustenance for the
worming sparrow, the sparrowing owl, and the owling eagle, approves the
needy man of prey, and makes a place for him at table.

Human nature is pretty well balanced; for every lacking virtue there is
a rough substitute that will serve at a pinch--as cunning is the
wisdom of the unwise, and ferocity the courage of the coward. Nobody
is altogether bad; the scoundrel who has grown rich by underpaying
the workmen in his factory will sometimes endow an asylum for indigent
seamen. To oppress one's own workmen, and provide for the workmen of
a neighbor--to skin those in charge of one's own interests, while
cottoning and oiling the residuary product of another's skinnery--that
is not very good benevolence, nor very good sense, but it serves in
place of both. The man who eats _pate de fois gras_ in the sweat of his
girl cashier's face, or wears purple and fine linen in order that his
typewriter may have an eocene gown and a pliocene hat, seems a tolerably
satisfactory specimen of the genus thief; but let us not forget that in
his own home--a fairly good one--he may enjoy and merit that highest
and most honorable title in the hierarchy of woman's favor, "a good
provider." One having a just claim to that glittering distinction should
enjoy a sacred immunity from the coarse and troublesome question, "From