Whenever the administrators of our “constantly increasing mass of capital” find they are no longer making profits, they either reduce wages, or raise the price of their product. One or the other they must do, because without profits the machine cannot run. When good times come they sometimes raise the wages again—because of the unions; but they never lower the price of the product—the poor consumer is a nonunion man. Two years ago Mr. Rockefeller put up the price of oil one cent, and the Beef Trust has done the same about once a year. And of course a general increase in prices is exactly the same as a general cut in wages—in either case the consumer has to work a little harder to make ends meet, and if he cannot work harder, he dies. The coal-miners rejoiced in the award of the Commission, untroubled by the extra fifty cents the coal companies put on the product; but when the miner comes to add up his account with the butcher and the oil man, he finds he is just where he was before. He does not know why, you understand—it is merely that he finds himself compelled to do without something he used to consider a necessity. Dun’s Review, figuring the cost of living in the United States upon a basis of 100, puts it at 72.455 in 1897, and 102.208 in 1904—an increase of forty-one per cent. Bradstreet, reckoning in another way, shows an increase from 6.51 in 1897, to 9.05 in 1904, or thirty-nine per cent. According to the annual report of the Commissary General, United States Army, the cost of feeding the soldiers of the army has increased from eighteen cents in 1898 to thirty-four and six-tenths cents in 1903. Statisticians have figured that the average employee earns ninety dollars a year more than he did twenty years ago, while it costs him to live on the same scale, one hundred and thirty dollars a year more. According to the last United States census the average compensation per wage earner was only three hundred and forty dollars, while the value of the manufactured product was two thousand four hundred and fifty dollars per wage earner. Perhaps no clearer statement of the intensification of exploitation can be found than in the fact that whereas the average profit on the products of all industries was three hundred and seventy-five dollars per wage earner in 1880, in 1900 it had increased to six hundred and twenty-six dollars.