Invested capital yields income because it enjoys the usufruct of the community's technological knowledge; it has an effectual monopoly of this usufruct because this machine technology requires large material appliances with which to do its work; the interest of the owners of established industrial plant will not tolerate innovations designed to supersede these appliances. The bearing of ownership on industry and on the fortunes of the common man is accordingly, in the main, the bearing which it has by virtue of its monopoly control of the industrial arts, and its consequent control of the conditions of employment and of the supply of vendible products. It takes effect chiefly by inhibition and privation; stoppage of production in case it brings no suitable profit to the investor, refusal of employment and of a livelihood to the workmen in case their product does not command a profitable price in the market. The expediency of so having the nation's industry managed on a footing of private ownership in the pursuit of private gain, by persons who can show no equitable personal claim to even the most modest livelihood, and whose habitual method of controlling industry is sabotage--refusal to let production go on except it affords them an unearned income--the expediency of all this is coming to be doubted by those who have to pay the cost of it. And it does not go far to lessen their doubts to find that the cost which they pay is commonly turned to no more urgent or useful purpose than a conspicuously wasteful consumption of superfluities by the captains of sabotage and their domestic establishments. This may not seem a veracious and adequate account of these matters; it may, in effect, fall short of the formulation: The truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth; nor does the question here turn on its adequacy as a statement of fact. Without prejudice to the question of its veracity and adequacy, it is believed to be such an account of these matters as will increasingly come easy and seem convincing to the common man who, in an ever increasing degree, finds himself pinched with privation and insecurity by a run of facts which will consistently bear this construction, and who perforce sees these facts from the prejudiced standpoint of a loser. To such a one, there is reason to believe, the view so outlined will seem all the more convincing the more attentively the pertinent facts and their bearing on his fortunes are considered. How far the contrary prejudice of those whose interest or training inclines them the other way may lead them to a different construction of these pertinent facts, does not concern the present argument; which has to do with this run of facts only as they bear on the prospective frame of mind of that unblest mass of the population who will have opportunity to present their proposals when peace at large shall have put national interests out of their preferential place in men's regard.