ocracy, it will also serve to show the
gainfulness of an unreservedly canny consumption of man-power with an
eye single to one's own net gain in terms of money.

* * * * *

Evidently this is a point in the articulation of the modern economic
system where a sufficiently ruthless outside authority, not actuated by
a primary regard for the pecuniary interests of the employers, might
conceivably with good effect enforce a more economical consumption of
the country's man-power. It is not a matter on which one prefers to
dwell, but it can do no harm to take note of the fact for once in a way,
that these several national establishments of the democratic order, as
they are now organised and administered, do somewhat uniformly and
pervasively operate with an effectual view to the advantage of a class,
so far as may plausibly be done. They are controlled by and administered
in behalf of those elements of the population that, for the purpose in
hand, make up a single loose-knit class,--the class that lives by income
rather than by work. It may be called the class of the business
interests, or of capital, or of gentlemen. It all comes to much the
same, for the purpose in hand.

The point in speaking of this contingent whose place in the economy of
human affairs it is to consume, or to own, or to pursue a margin of
profit, is simply that of contrasting this composite human contingent
with the common man; whose numbers account for some nine-tenths or more
of the community, while his class accounts for something less than
one-tenth of the invested wealth, and appreciably less than that
proportion of the discretionary national establishment,--the government,
national or local, courts, attorneys, civil service, diplomatic and
consular, military and naval. The arrangement may be called a
gentlemen's government, if one would rather have it that way; but a
gentleman is necessarily one who lives on free income from invested
wealth--without such a source of free, that is to say unearned, income
he becomes a decayed gentleman. Again, pushing the phrasing back a step
farther toward the ground facts, there are those who would speak of the
current establishments as "capitalistic;" but this term is out of line
in that it fails to touch the human element in the case, and
institutions, such as governmental establishments and their functioning,
are after all nothing but the accustomed ways and means of human
behavio