He represents the highest development of the salaried. employee. Other men comparable with him as generals of industry have soon graduated from the pay roll to work for themselves. Rockefeller, Hill, Spreckles, Mills, Stanford, Huntington, Hopkins, and Carnegie all began poor, but all turned their energies to putting themselves into a position in which everything amassed by their brains would go into their own bank deposits. Schwab alone has been content to remain a glorified wage earner, cheerfully putting ten millions into the pockets of his employers for every million retained by himself.

It is as such a wage earner that he is of such peculiar significance. Technologists may grow enthusiastic over his work in connection with Captain Jones in perfecting the "metal mixer," by which melted iron instead of cold pig is used in steel making, and the whole industry is transformed. They may admire the bold ingenuity of the devices by which a boy enabled his employers to undertake the manufacture of armor plate in competition with rivals who had spent years and millions in constructing the gigantic special plant then considered necessary. But the real value of Mr. Schwab's career is in the light it throws upon the possibilities open to those vast wage-earning masses, of which he has chosen to remain a member.

It is generally understood that Mr. Schwab does not believe in trades unions, as usually managed. Plenty of men who have worked their way from poverty to wealth hold similar views. Their standpoint is purely selfish. When they were making two dollars and fifty cents a week, they would have been glad of a union to help them to make more. When they are pocketing hundreds of thousands a year, they see no need for a union to help anybody else. They oppose the union for its merits. Just in so far as it helps the workers, they object to it.

If this were Mr. Schwab's position, it would not be worth notice. But his idea is something very different. His objection to the union policy is that it discourages ability. He wishes to leave the way open for every worker to win, if he can, a success like his own. He sees that possibility in the new organization of industry.

To his mind, the trades union of the future is the trust. He

sees in that the solution of the whole problem of capital and labor, and of the problem of national prosperity as well. His theory was explained by himself some time ago in these words:

"The larger the output, the smaller, relatively, is the cost of production. This is a trade axiom. It holds good whether the output consists of pins or of locomotives. It is much more economical, proportionately, to run three machines under one roof than it is to run one. It is cheaper to run a dozen than it is to run three, and cheaper still to run a hundred. Therefore, the larger plant has an undoubted superiority over the small plant, and this advantage increases almost indefinitely as the process of enlargement continues.

The well managed combination is a direct gain to the state. Anyone who doubts this need only consult the foreign newspapers. Everywhere, he will find a cry of industrial alarm leveled, not at the individual American manufacturer, but at the American nation. This is because the combination has done for the American state what the individual was never able to do-put it in industrial control of the world.

The capitalist and the laborer are equal sharers in the advantages the new scheme offers. Capital finds itself more amply protected, and labor finds an easier route to a partnership with capital. To the workingman, the combination offers the most feasible scheme of industrial coöperation ever presented."

Mr. Schwab is a socialist in disguise. He recalls the difficulty a worker found under the old individualistic system in securing a foothold in business for himself. His savings would not buy a factory, or a partnership in one. The exceptional man could save enough to start a little workshop, and he could add to his business from day to day, until with good luck he had built up a great industry, but the average wage earner could never hope to be his own employer. Now, a man with any thrift at all can buy a share of stock. A little later he can buy another share. Before he knows it, he is perceptibly a partner in the business that employs him. This Mr. Schwab believes to be the direction in which evolution is going to carry our industrial system. He has given his views. a dazzling illustration in his own person. In his case it has been, not merely the purchase of one share at a time out of

weekly savings, but the acquisition of blocks of stock as a reward for conspicuous ability. The Carnegie idea has been to give an interest in the business to the ablest brains in the service of the company. That has been also one of the ideas through which young Mr. Harmsworth, of England, has been enabled to pile up a million for every year of his life. If we ever come to the Coöperative Commonwealth, perhaps a statue of Schwab may be found along with the effigies of Rockefeller, Morgan, and Carnegie in its Westminster Abbey. These nationalizers and internationalizers of industry are wiping out the competitive system, not only in the United States, but in the whole world. For the present, their work has its ugly, selfish side, but they are toiling, some of them perhaps unconsciously, but some with undoubted appreciation of the meaning of their efforts, toward the creation of a gigantic industrial organism, in which every human atom will be harmoniously related with every other.

Bellamy's ideal was a community, the products of whose industry should be equally divided among all its members. Schwab's is a community in which every man can get what he earns, and in which earning possibilities are unlimited. Like Napoleon, he would open a career to talent. He would have a basis of well-paid, comfortable labor, but he would have no laboring class. He would have every position in the industrial world open to any man with the capacity to reach it, and he would put no brakes on any man's progress. There would be no speed limit for automobiles on his industrial highway. Thus he would reconcile the aspirations of ambitious workers with the need for the intelligent direction of industry. Instead of having a business policy directed by unsympathetic labor delegates from outside, he would promote the ablest of those laborers, and have them direct the business sympathetically from the inside. It would be an interesting plan, even in the head of an impecunious professor. It is especially interesting as the program of a man that controls a business with a capital of one billion five hundred million dollars, and a yearly income of over one hundred million.

Charles M. Schwab is a living refutation of the theory that a driver of workmen must be a hard, unfeeling tyrant. He is bubbling over with sympathy and good humor, but he keeps a huge industrial army on edge by the force of infectious

energy and of perfect organization. A hard overseer may make his men afraid to shirk — Mr. Schwab has learned the nobler and more profitable art of encouraging every man to do his best.

MANNERS AND DRESS.

T is well for young men to obtain, at the very start of their career, some idea of the value of politeness. Some cannot be otherwise than urbane. They are born so. One can kick them roundly and soundly, and they will not refuse to smile, if it be done good-naturedly. They escape all corners by a necessity of their nature. If their souls had only corporeal volume, we could see them making their way through a crowd, like little spaniels, scaring nobody, running between nobody's legs, but winding along shrinkingly and gracefully, seeing a master in every man, and thus flattering every man's vanity into good nature; but really spoiling their reputation as reliable dogs, by their undiscriminating and universal complaisance. There is a self-forgetfulness which is so deep as to be below self-respect, and such instances as we meet with should be treated compassionately.

Puppyism is not politeness. The genuine article is as necessary to success, and particularly to any enjoyable success, as integrity, or industry, or any other indispensable quality. All machinery ruins itself by friction, without the presence of a lubricating fluid. Politeness, or civility, or urbanity, or whatever we choose to call it, is the oil which preserves the machinery of society from destruction. We are obliged to bend to one another to step aside and let another pass, to ignore this and that peculiarity, to speak pleasantly when irritated, and to do a great many things to avoid abrasion and collision. In other words, in a world of selfish interests and pursuits, where every man is pursuing his own special good, we must mask our real designs in studied politeness, or mingle them with real kindness, in order to elevate the society of men above the society of wolves. Young men generally would doubtless be thoroughly astonished if they could comprehend at a single glance how greatly their personal happiness, popularity, prosperity, and usefulness depend on their

manners.

I know young men who, in the discharge of their duties,