§ 7. Work and Pay of the Middleman.--The complaint that the middleman confers no service, and deserves no pay, is the result of two fallacies. The first, to which allusion has been made already, consists in the failure to recognize the work of distribution done by the middleman. The second and more important is the confusion of mind which leads people to conclude that because under different circumstances a particular class of work might be dispensed with, therefore that work is under present circumstances useless and undeserving of reward. Lawyers might be useless if there were no dishonesty or crime, but we do not therefore feel justified in describing as useless the present work they do. With every progress of new inventions we are constantly rendering useless some class or other of undoubted "workers." So the middleman in his various capacities may be dispensed with, if the organization of industrial society is so changed that he is no longer required; but until such changes are affected he must get, and deserves, his pay. It may indeed be true that certain classes of middlemen are enabled by the position they hold to extract either from their employers or from the public a profit which seems out of proportion to the services they render. But this is by no means generally the case with the middleman in his capacity of "sweater." Even where a middleman does make large profits, we are not justified in describing such gain as excessive or unfair, unless we are prepared to challenge the claim of "free competition" to determine the respective money values of industrial services. The "sweating" middleman does work which is at present necessary; he gets pay; if we think he gets too much, are we prepared with any rule to determine even approximately how much he ought to get?