They delve in mines, and risk accident, disease and death, or suffer an abjectly lingering life of impoverishment. Thousands of coal miners are killed every year, and many thousands more are injured, in order that two boys and others of their class may draw huge profits.[188] More than 10,000 persons are killed, and 97,000 injured, every year on the railroads, so that the income enjoyed by these lads and others shall not diminish. Nearly all of these casualties are due to economizing in expense, working employees to an extreme fatiguing limit, and refusing to provide proper safety appliances. Millions more workers drudge in rolling mills, railroad shops and factories; they wear out their lives on farms, in packing houses and stores. For what? Why, foolish questioner, for the rudiments of an existence; do you not know that the world's dispossessed must pay heavily for the privilege of living? As these lads hold, either wholly or partly, the titles to all this inherited property; in plain words, to a formidable part of the machinery of business, the millions of workers must sweat and bend the back, and pile up a ceaseless flow of riches for them. [Illustration: MARSHAL FIELD III. and HENRY FIELD. The Boys Who Inherited $140,000,000.] Marshall Field III., still in knickerbockers, receives $60,000 a week; his brother Henry, $40,000 a week. The sum in both cases automatically increases as the interest on the principal compounds. What do many of the workers who supply this revenue get? Patterson gives this authentic list of wages: Pullman Company blacksmiths, $16.43 a week; boiler-makers, $17; carpenters, $12.38; machinists, $16.65; painters, $13.60, and laborers, $9.90 a week. As for the lower wages paid to the workers in the Field stores, we have already given them. And apart from the exploitation of employees, every person in Chicago who rides on the street or elevated railroads, and who uses gas, electricity or telephones, must pay direct tribute to these lads. How decayed monarchial establishments are in these days! Kings mostly must depend upon Parliaments for their civil lists of expenditure; but Capitalism does not have to ask leave of anybody; it appropriates what it wants. This is the status of the Field fortune now. Let the Field striplings bless their destiny that they live in no medieval age, when each baron had to defend his possessions by his strong right arm successfully, or be compelled to relinquish. This age is one when Little Lord Fauntleroys can own armies of profit producers, without being distracted from their toys. Whatever defense is needed is supplied by society, with its governments and its judges, its superserviceable band of lawyers, and its armed forces. Two delicate children are upheld in enormous possessions and vast power, while millions of fellow beings are suffered to remain in destitution. FOOTNOTES: [179] "The Truth About the Trusts":266-267. [180] "Industrial Evolution of the United States," 313.