industrial, railroad, mining
and other corporations. The workers of all these toil for the Field
boys.

They delve in mines, and risk accident, disease and death, or suffer an
abjectly lingering life of impoverishment. Thousands of coal miners are
killed every year, and many thousands more are injured, in order that
two boys and others of their class may draw huge profits.[188] More than
10,000 persons are killed, and 97,000 injured, every year on the
railroads, so that the income enjoyed by these lads and others shall not
diminish. Nearly all of these casualties are due to economizing in
expense, working employees to an extreme fatiguing limit, and refusing
to provide proper safety appliances. Millions more workers drudge in
rolling mills, railroad shops and factories; they wear out their lives
on farms, in packing houses and stores. For what? Why, foolish
questioner, for the rudiments of an existence; do you not know that
the world's dispossessed must pay heavily for the privilege of living?
As these lads hold, either wholly or partly, the titles to all this
inherited property; in plain words, to a formidable part of the
machinery of business, the millions of workers must sweat and bend the
back, and pile up a ceaseless flow of riches for them.

[Illustration: MARSHAL FIELD III. and HENRY FIELD.
The Boys Who Inherited $140,000,000.]

Marshall Field III., still in knickerbockers, receives $60,000 a week;
his brother Henry, $40,000 a week. The sum in both cases automatically
increases as the interest on the principal compounds. What do many of
the workers who supply this revenue get? Patterson gives this authentic
list of wages:

Pullman Company blacksmiths, $16.43 a week; boiler-makers, $17;
carpenters, $12.38; machinists, $16.65; painters, $13.60, and laborers,
$9.90 a week. As for the lower wages paid to the workers in the Field
stores, we have already given them. And apart from the exploitation of
employees, every person in Chicago who rides on the street or elevated
railroads, and who uses gas, electricity or telephones, must pay direct
tribute to these lads. How decayed monarchial establishments are in
these days! Kings mostly must depend upon Parliaments for their civil
lists of expenditure; but Capitalism does not have to ask leave of
anybody; it appropriates what it wants.

This is the status of the Field fortune now. Let the Field striplings
bless their destiny that they live in no medieval age, when ea