At a time when all business was run on the chaotic and desultory lines characteristic of the purely competitive age, he had the foresight and shrewdness to perceive that the storekeeper who depended upon the jobber and the manufacturer for his goods was largely at the mercy of those elements. Even if he were not, there were two sets of profits between him and the making of the goods--the jobber's profits and the manufacturer's. Years before this vital fact was impressed upon the minds of the floundering retailers, Field understood, and acted upon, it. He became his own manufacturer and jobber. Thus he was complacently able to supply his department store with many goods at cost, and pocket the profits that otherwise would have gone to jobber and manufacturer. In, however, the very act of making three sets of profits, while many other stores made only one set, Field paid his employees at the retail store rate; that is to say, he paid no more in wages than the store which had to buy often from the jobber, who in turn, purchased from the manufacturer. With this salient fact in mind, one begins to get a clear insight into some of the reasons why Field made such enormous profits, and an understanding of the consequent contrast of his firm doing a business of $50,000,000 a year while thousands of his employees had to work for a wretched pittance. He could have afforded to have paid them many times more than they were getting and still would have made large profits. But this would have been an imbecilic violation of that established canon of business: Pay your employees as little as you can, and sell your goods for the highest price you can get. Field was one of the biggest dry goods manufacturers in the world. He owned, says a writer, scores of enormous factories in England, Ireland and Scotland. "The provinces of France," this eulogist goes on, "are dotted with his mills. The clatter of the Marshall Field looms is heard in Spain, Italy, Germany, Austria and Russia. Nor is the Orient neglected by this master of fabrics. Plodding Chinese and the skilled Japs are numbered by the thousands on the payroll of the Chicago merchant and manufacturer. On the other side of the equator are vast woolen mills in Australia, and the chain extends to South America, with factories in Brazil and in other of our neighboring republics." In all of these factories the labor of men, women and children was harshly exploited; in nearly all of them the workers were in an unorganized state, and therefore deprived of every vestige of self-protection. Boys and girls of tenderest age were mercilessly ground into dollars; their young life's blood dyed deep the fabrics which brought Field riches. In this dehumanizing business Field was only doing what the entire commercial aristocracy the world over was doing.