It is also important to notice that these profits are not taken “in kind”—the product must first be sold, so that both wages and profits can be paid in money. It thus follows that the amount of profits is strictly limited by the amount of _market_ that can be found; in other words, that a society whose income is limited, is also limited as to its profit-yielding capacity—that, for instance, a society of eighty millions of people receiving a mere living wage will be able to yield just so much rent, interest and dividends, and not any more. But what it yields has in the past been enough, says the reader. Why will it not be enough for the future? Just this is the crux of the whole matter. Rent, interest, dividends, it must be understood, are fractions; and fractions may be decreased as well by increasing the denominator, as by decreasing the numerator. A man, for instance, who invested a hundred dollars and made six, would receive six per cent. interest; but if he invested the second year one hundred and six dollars, and was able still to gain only six, his profit would be, not six per cent., but only five and a fraction. If he wished to make six, he would have to squeeze out a little more than six dollars; would have to compel the man who paid it to him to work just a little harder. And that, in miniature, is a representation of what is going on in our society to-day. You, the well-meaning reader, who are struggling to make the world better, and failing—whether the thing which you are trying to reform be politics or literature or religion, New York or Colorado or the Philippines, Fifth Avenue or Wall Street or Hell’s Kitchen—you are meeting with failure because of that little arithmetical difficulty which has just been set forth. Consider our millionaire fortunes, how they grow. Consider, for instance, that Mr. John D. Rockefeller makes fifty per cent. a year upon his holdings in the Standard Oil Company. The stock of the Standard Oil Company is now at five hundred, and has been as high as eight hundred in the market. This is assuming that Mr. Rockefeller invested in the stock at par—though as a matter of fact, he put in only about twenty dollars a share, which would make his profit two hundred and fifty per cent. His income is at least fifty million dollars a year.