We want the merchants to remember that, while we have thus striven to protect those masses of the people whom we represent and whose ADVOCATE we are, we have also advanced enormously, although without premeditation, the fortune and quick success of every capable and legitimate merchant. Who owns the stock in the street railroads? A few individuals--a Widener, an Elkins, a Yerkes, a Whitney, or some other energetic private individual. One street railroad system, let us say, employs ten thousand men. They struggle to add one dollar per day to their pay. We help them with moral support and publicity, and they succeed. TEN THOUSAND FAMILIES have each ONE DOLLAR a day more to spend, or ten thousand dollars a day in all. What becomes of that ten thousand dollars added daily to the living-money of ten thousand families? EVERY DOLLAR OF IT GOES INTO THE HANDS OF THE MERCHANT, THE LANDLORD, OR THE SAVINGS BANK. If the men had not got that increase in wages, what would have become of that ten thousand dollars daily, or $3,650,000 A YEAR? Would it have gone to the merchants of the great cities? Would it have gone to build up thousands of comfortable little homes in all the suburbs of the great towns? Would it have enabled thousands of American boys and girls to stay in school instead of going in their infancy to the mills and factories? No! If that money were not distributed among the people in the shape of good American wages for good American work, it would go to build big race tracks, where thieves and gamblers are manufactured. It would go to buying foolish bogus antiquities that no man needs. It would go to building ridiculous and uncalled-for palaces where human mushrooms without a sense of humor imitate in their idleness the active types of the past. ---- When this newspaper adds to the payroll of a great corporation, it adds to the happiness of a great many families; and therein lie its pride and its excuse for being. And at the same time this increase in the payroll of the Trust or the monopolizer of public privileges means an increase in the income, the prosperity, the legitimate reward of the enterprising merchant, builder and general business man. We do not lack criticism from well-meaning friends who conduct great stores or other business enterprises. We appreciate all criticisms and suggestions. We offer a suggestion in return: Let the builder who dislikes unions GO TO CHINA and build his apartment houses. He will find patient workmen at ten cents a day. He will find laws that suppress the unions, and laws that suppress the newspaper which takes the side of the poor. He will find a non-union Utopia. But he will not find tenants for his buildings, because in a land where men don't get high wages they can't pay high rents, and when the few Li Hung Changs have built their palaces the building boom is over. Let the great merchant who deplores unions start a DEPARTMENT STORE IN CHINA.