There is, if one had only time to point it out, no tiniest nook of our society where human lives are not being ground up for profit; the capitalists are ground up, as Mr. Schwab was, and the meanest woman of the town shares his fate. There was a time when a prostitute was an independent person, who could support herself until she grew old; nowadays, under the stress of competition, every city has its prostitution trust. It takes capital to pay the police, and the business is therefore in the hands of the proprietors of houses, who buy young girls out of the slums and immigrant population by thousands and tens of thousands, use them up in a year or two, and then fling them out into the gutters to die, often when they are not out of their teens. In the same way the gambler and the saloon-keeper are now as much employees as are the officials of the Standard Oil Company: the whole profits of these occupations flowing into the hands of some “captain of industry” as inevitably as all the rills on the mountain-side flow into the river. All of these facts are perfectly familiar, but for the sake of concreteness, I will quote a paragraph from Mr. Steffens’s book, “The Shame of the Cities.” He is telling of the city of Pittsburg: “The vice-graft ... is a legitimate business, conducted, not by the police, but in an orderly fashion by syndicates, and the chairman of one of the parties at the last election, said it was worth two hundred and fifty thousand dollars a year. I saw a man who was laughed at for offering seventeen thousand five hundred dollars for the slot-machine concession; he was told that it was let for much more. ‘Speakeasies’ (unlicensed drinking places) pay so well that when they earn five hundred dollars or more in twenty-four hours their proprietors often make a bare living. Disorderly houses are managed by ward syndicates. Permission is had from the syndicate real-estate agent, who alone can rent them. The syndicate hires a house from the owners at, say, thirty-five dollars a month, and he lets it to a woman at from thirty-five to fifty dollars a week. For furniture, the tenant must go to the ‘official furniture-man,’ who delivers one thousand dollars worth of ‘fixings’ for a note for three thousand dollars, on which high interest must be paid. For beer the tenant must go to the ‘official bottler,’ and pay two dollars for a one-dollar case of beer; for wines and liquors to the ‘official liquor-commissioner,’ who charges ten dollars for five dollars’ worth; for clothes to the ‘official wrapper-maker.’ These women may not buy shoes, hats, jewellery, or any other luxury or necessity except from the official concessionaries, and then only at the official, monopoly prices.” And by way of conclusion, in reference to this particular aspect of the consequences of the “increasing mass of capital,” let me quote the following little incident, which a friend of mine clipped from one of the New York newspapers: