It is of the last importance in this connection to notice, that everything in Profits and Wages turns in the last resort upon the breadth and freedom of MARKETS. It is out of the return-service received from the _sale_ of the commodities produced jointly by the capitalists and laborers, that both wages and profits must ultimately be paid. There is no other possible source of them. When the Market fails, everything fails that leads up to a market. Particularly fails the Demand for laborers for the next industrial cycle, and of course drops also the prospective wages for that cycle. The public folly and universal loss of shutting off foreign markets for our own commodities by lofty tariff-barriers, as has been conspicuously done by the United States for thirty years past, follows of course from this radical truth; and the Wages of laborers, instead of being lifted by tariff-taxes, as has been so often falsely and wickedly asserted, are inevitably _depressed_ by them, because they effectually forbid to capitalists and laborers their best and freely chosen _markets_ for the sale of their joint products. Another vastly important matter, constantly affecting the Demand for laborers of the second class, is the Competency or otherwise of the practical managers of the Capital invested in industrial enterprises. Capital cannot manage itself. It is of itself wholly inert. It is always either a Commodity or a Credit. Conscious of their inability to handle wisely their own bits of Capital, or else taught it through a bitter experience, by far the larger number of individual owners of it loan it to others to manage; they invest it in some industrial corporation, in a bank or a mill or a railroad. Some one person, or at least a small body of persons, must practically manage now all specific accumulations of capital. It is they in their capacity of manipulating-capitalists, who constitute in large measure the Demand for laborers. But such managers, who are at once skilful and long-headed and honest, do not grow upon a chance bush. They are rare. Most of them in this country at least have been those, who started in a small way in the control of their own earned or small-inherited properties, and rose through practice and knowledge and conscience to the ability to handle profitably to all concerned large masses of Capital. In the hands of such men, given a tolerable chance by public law and private circumstances, both Profits and Wages are sure to come in satisfactorily. They are Captains of Industry. They are an honor to human nature. They are a blessing to the whole community. They have no need and no will to ask to be bolstered up in their business by unjust taxes enforced upon a whole people.