ny price, others because they
could not get what they thought a fair price. I accosted some of the
latter, and they told me their grievances. It was very little comfort I
could give them. "I am sorry for you," I said. "You get little enough,
certainly, and yet the wonder to me is, not that industries conducted
as these are do not pay you living wages, but that they are able to pay
you any wages at all."

Making my way back again after this to the peninsular city, toward
three o'clock I stood on State Street, staring, as if I had never seen
them before, at the banks and brokers' offices, and other financial
institutions, of which there had been in the State Street of my vision
no vestige. Business men, confidential clerks, and errand boys were
thronging in and out of the banks, for it wanted but a few minutes of
the closing hour. Opposite me was the bank where I did business, and
presently I crossed the street, and, going in with the crowd, stood in
a recess of the wall looking on at the army of clerks handling money,
and the cues of depositors at the tellers' windows. An old gentleman
whom I knew, a director of the bank, passing me and observing my
contemplative attitude, stopped a moment.

"Interesting sight, isn't it, Mr. West," he said. "Wonderful piece of
mechanism; I find it so myself. I like sometimes to stand and look on
at it just as you are doing. It's a poem, sir, a poem, that's what I
call it. Did you ever think, Mr. West, that the bank is the heart of
the business system? From it and to it, in endless flux and reflux, the
life blood goes. It is flowing in now. It will flow out again in the
morning"; and pleased with his little conceit, the old man passed on
smiling.

Yesterday I should have considered the simile apt enough, but since
then I had visited a world incomparably more affluent than this, in
which money was unknown and without conceivable use. I had learned that
it had a use in the world around me only because the work of producing
the nation's livelihood, instead of being regarded as the most strictly
public and common of all concerns, and as such conducted by the nation,
was abandoned to the hap-hazard efforts of individuals. This original
mistake necessitated endless exchanges to bring about any sort of
general distribution of products. These exchanges money effected--how
equitably, might be seen in a walk from the tenement house districts to
the Back Bay--at the cost of an army of men taken f