The labor problem has not yet received a solution. Its central difficulty is to secure to workmen a fair share of the blessings of life. No one supposes that, taking the world together, they do now receive a fair share. In this country, workmen have fared uncommonly well; but there is a belief, resting on some facts, that the actual rewards of labor, as measured in the blessings of life, are rapidly declining, and must go on declining under the existing industrial system. Some theories on the subject are no longer tenable. The workman’s theory that capital robs him is not sound. Money, once worth ten per cent., has fallen to three per cent. for perfectly safe loans; when higher interest is paid, it is paid for conducting the business of lending (as in banks) or for risks of the loans. The government can borrow a thousand and more millions at two and one-half to three per cent.—and this shows what a hard time of it capital is having. The risks of manufacturing probably bleed labor; but the bleeding is not in the form of which the workman thinks. It is not profit but loss which drives the lancet in to the hilt. Political economists have shown (and they are entirely unanimous) that the high profits produce a competition which brings down profits. Capital is cheap; large profits can be made only in conditions which are monopolistic. Our system of industrial exchange has one very weak place, called _credit_. This credit is a hole in the net through which industrial gains are dropped into the bottomless sea; and the system is so fixed upon us that there is no hope of reform in our day. To pay when we buy more and more offends something in our make-up. A wise man proposed that one, two and five dollar bills be abolished, in order that we might circulate, as the French do, a large amount of silver. A member of Congress immediately amended the suggestion thus: “No. Put this silver in the United States Treasury, and let us use ‘silver notes.’” We insist upon having even a credit money, and object to “the trouble” of handling coin. This refined and transcendental sentiment, or taste, or æstheticism about coin runs through us. The man who always pays, as well as the sneak who never pays if he can avoid it, says, “Charge it,” when he buys goods. Goods are sold by the manufacturer to the jobber on credit; the jobber sells to the wholesale houses on credit; the wholesale dealers sell to retailers on credit; the retailers sell to consumers on credit. It is within the mark to say, that more is lost in these four credit traps than capital gets—much more. It is not, in fact, the capitalist, but the well-dressed and the shabbily-dressed thieves who cheat and rob labor.