Primarily, which is very notable and curious, I observe that men of business rarely know the meaning of the word "rich." At least if they know, they do not in their reasonings allow for the fact, that it is a relative word, implying its opposite "poor" as positively as the word "north" implies its opposite "south." Men nearly always speak and write as if riches were absolute, and it were possible, by following certain scientific precepts, for everybody to be rich. Whereas riches are a power like that of electricity, acting only through inequalities or negations of itself. The force of the guinea you have in your pocket depends wholly on the default of a guinea in your neighbor's pocket. If he did not want it, it would be of no use to you; the degree of power it possesses depends accurately upon the need or desire he has for it,--and the art of making yourself rich, in the ordinary mercantile economist's sense, is therefore equally and necessarily the art of keeping your neighbor poor. Lynggaard & Co. BY HJALMAR BERGSTRÖM (Contemporary Danish dramatist, born 1868. The present play deals with the modern industrial struggle. The wife of a great manufacturer has become the victim of melancholia after a strike) MRS. LYNGGAARD (_absorbed in her memories_):--I shall never forget the day when the people went back to work. I was watching them from my bedroom window. For four months they had been starving--starving, do you understand?--they and theirs. Then they turned up again one winter morning before daylight, and there they stood and shivered in the yards. They had no over-clothes, of course, and they were shaking both from cold and from weakness. And then their faces were all covered with beards, so that one couldn't recognize them. There they stood and waited a long time, a very long time.... At last Heymann [the manager] appeared in the doorway and read something from a paper. It was the conditions of surrender, I suppose. None of them looked up. Then, as they were about to walk in and begin working, Heymann stopped them by holding up his hand, and he said something I couldn't hear. But after a little while I saw Olsen [the strike-leader] standing all by himself in a cleared place. (_A shiver runs through her at the recollection._) Once I saw a picture of an execution in a prison yard.... It lasted only a few seconds. Then Olsen said a few words to his comrades and walked away, looking white as a ghost. The crowd opened up to let him pass through. Then the rest stood there for a while looking so strangely depressed and not knowing what to do. And at last they went in, one by one, bent and broken. MIKKELSEN:--Olsen wasn't allowed to go back to work? MRS. LYNGGAARD:--It was he who had been their leader, and it was his fault that they had held out as long as they did. And then Olsen began to look for work elsewhere, but none of the other companies would have anything to do with him. MIKKELSEN (_shrugging his shoulders_):--War is war.