ur.

The officer of an uptown trust company or bank is apt to belong to the
latter class. Or perhaps one is in real estate and does business at the
dinner tables of his friends. He makes love and money at the same time.
His salary and commissions correspond somewhat to the unearned increment
on the freeholds in which he deals. These are minor illustrations, but a
majority of the administrative positions in our big corporations carry
salaries out of all proportion to the services rendered.

These are the places my friends are all looking for--for themselves or
their children. The small stockholder would not vote the president of
his company a salary of one hundred thousand dollars a year, or the
vice-president fifty thousand dollars; but the rich man who controls the
stock is willing to give his brother or his nephew a soft snap. From
what I know of corporate enterprise in these United States, God save the
minority stockholder! But we and our brothers and sons and nephews must
live--on Easy Street. We must be able to give expensive dinners and go
to the theater and opera, and take our families to Europe--and we can't
do it without money.

We must be able to keep up our end without working too hard, to be safe
and warm, well fed and smartly turned out, and able to call in a
specialist and a couple of trained nurses if one of the children falls
ill; we want thirty-five feet of southerly exposure instead of
seventeen, menservants instead of maid-servants, and a new motor every
two years.

We do not object to working--that is to say, we pride ourselves on
having a job. We like to be moderately busy. We would not have enough to
amuse us all day if we did not go to the office in the morning; but what
we do is not _work_! It is occupation perhaps--but there is no labor
about it, either of mind or body. It is a sinecure--a "cinch." We could
stay at home and most of us would not be missed. It is not the
seventy-five-hundred-dollar-a-year vice-president but the
eight-hundred-and-fifty-dollar clerk for want of whom the machine would
stop if he were sick. Our labor is a kind of masculine light housework.

We probably have private incomes, thanks to our fathers or great
uncles--not large enough to enable us to cut much of a dash, to be sure,
but sufficient to give us confidence--and the proceeds of our daily
toil, such as it is, go toward the purchase of luxuries merely. Because
we are in business we are able to give bigger and