e successful.

CENTERING ALL PROFITS IN HIMSELF.

At a time when all business was run on the chaotic and desultory lines
characteristic of the purely competitive age, he had the foresight and
shrewdness to perceive that the storekeeper who depended upon the jobber
and the manufacturer for his goods was largely at the mercy of those
elements. Even if he were not, there were two sets of profits between
him and the making of the goods--the jobber's profits and the
manufacturer's.

Years before this vital fact was impressed upon the minds of the
floundering retailers, Field understood, and acted upon, it. He became
his own manufacturer and jobber. Thus he was complacently able to supply
his department store with many goods at cost, and pocket the profits
that otherwise would have gone to jobber and manufacturer. In, however,
the very act of making three sets of profits, while many other stores
made only one set, Field paid his employees at the retail store rate;
that is to say, he paid no more in wages than the store which had to buy
often from the jobber, who in turn, purchased from the manufacturer.
With this salient fact in mind, one begins to get a clear insight into
some of the reasons why Field made such enormous profits, and an
understanding of the consequent contrast of his firm doing a business of
$50,000,000 a year while thousands of his employees had to work for a
wretched pittance. He could have afforded to have paid them many times
more than they were getting and still would have made large profits. But
this would have been an imbecilic violation of that established canon of
business: Pay your employees as little as you can, and sell your goods
for the highest price you can get.

Field was one of the biggest dry goods manufacturers in the world. He
owned, says a writer, scores of enormous factories in England, Ireland
and Scotland. "The provinces of France," this eulogist goes on, "are
dotted with his mills. The clatter of the Marshall Field looms is heard
in Spain, Italy, Germany, Austria and Russia. Nor is the Orient
neglected by this master of fabrics. Plodding Chinese and the skilled
Japs are numbered by the thousands on the payroll of the Chicago
merchant and manufacturer. On the other side of the equator are vast
woolen mills in Australia, and the chain extends to South America, with
factories in Brazil and in other of our neighboring republics."

In all of these factories the labor of men, women a