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Show WHAT WILL THE OUTCOME BE? When one reads of the great combines of capital, capi-tal, sees stocks watered up to double values, and marks how they are piling up until there is not money enough in all the world to purchase them, and marks, further, that they are going on and increasing month by month until more than half the business of the country is absorbed by them, the natural question is where will the busines stop? "How long before all the mighty financial edifices will come tumbling down like rotten icebergs?" ice-bergs?" On the other hand, when we see the ranks of labor, through their unions, consolidating with more unanimity, more discipline and more exactions exac-tions every year, we wonder where they will stop at last and how capital will dare to engage in great enterprises that will involve the employment employ-ment of hundreds and thousands of men. Again, we see hundreds of thousands of people who depend de-pend upon the capitalist on the one hand and the laborer on the other to supply them with many of the essentials of life, put to- great expense and often placed in great danger through the dif-erences dif-erences and misunderstandings between labor and capital, and the wrongs thus worked upon them are most serious. We have recently seen one of the quarrels almost bring on a coal famine in the most thickly settled portion of our country. Then, outside, is a school of economists who despair of redress for wrongs and exactions until the Government Gov-ernment takes direct control, until it absorbs the great industries and carries them on as it now does the Postofflce department. What is the solution solu-tion to be? It looks as though the greater combines com-bines were preparing for the time when some party will come into power that will insist upon condemning many of the public utilities, taking them in churgo and issuing interest-bearing bonds to pay for them. Take the railroads, for instance. Suppose they were tomorrow to pass under Government Gov-ernment ownership. At half their present charges they could pay " their operating expenses, their repairs, and yet easily pay the interest on their cost and provide in addition a sinking fund which would in a few years pay off the debt. But suppose that the insistence is that they shall not be bought for what they have cost, but for what they could be duplicated for, what will the magnates do then? Again, with the purchase laborers will be paid what the Government pleases 10 Pay. There will be no strikes, no need of labor "nions. Men seeking for work will take the wage ottered, or they will have to seek some other field. The outlook is that the contending forces are even now preparing for what Herbert Spencer Agnates as enlightened socialism. Thero must be an improvement over present conditions. Money and steam and electric power mako possible such combinations, that the man without capital can, by his individual efforts, e. no headway in attempted competition. The result is too many rich men on the one hand, too ""toy poor on the other. There must be a solution. Our Republic is the Grid's hope and it must be maintained, but it nnot be under a system which breeds perpetual . i Content among the masses. |