s),
he was "a business man of the best type." From this exceptional
commentary it can be seen what was the current and rooted opinion of the
character of business men in general. Field's rigorous exploitation of
his tens of thousands of workers in his stores, in his Pullman
factories, and elsewhere, was not a hermetically sealed secret; but this
exploitation, no matter to what extremes to which it was carried, was an
ordinary routine of prevailing business methods.[183]

Of the virtual enslavement of the worker; of the robbing him of what he
produced; of the drastic laws enforced against him; of the debasement of
men, women and children--of all of these facts the organs of public
expression, the politicians and the clergy, with few exceptions, said
nothing.

Everywhere, except in obscure quarters of despised workingmen's
meetings, or in the writings or speeches of a few intellectual
protestors, the dictum was proclaimed and instilled that conditions were
just and good. In a thousand disingenuous ways, backed by nimble
sophistry, the whole ruling class, with its clouds of retainers, turned
out either an increasing flood of praise of these conditions, or masses
of misinforming matter which tended to reconcile or blind the victim to
his pitiful drudgery. The masters of industry, who reaped fabulous
riches from such a system, were covered with slavish adulation, and were
represented in flowery, grandiloquent phrases as indispensable men,
without whom the industrial system of the country could not be carried
on. Nay, even more: while being plundered and ever anew plundered of the
fruits of their labor, the workers were told, (as they are increasingly
being told), that they should honor the magnates and be thankful to them
for providing work.

HE STEALS MILLIONS IN TAXES.

Marshall Field, as we have said, was heralded far and wide as an
unusually honest business man, the implication being that every cent of
his fortune was made fairly and squarely. Those fawners to wealth, and
they were many, who persisted in acclaiming his business methods as
proper and honorable, were grievously at a loss for an explanation when
his will was probated, and it was found that even under the existing
laws, favorable as they were to wealth, he had been nothing more than a
common perjurer and a cheat. It was too true, alas! This man "of strict
probity" had to be catalogued with the rest of his class.

For many years he had insisted on pay