But there are others. Next after the magnates of applied science in public estimation, but of equal economic importance, I would place the Captains of Industry. Without their grasp of human necessity and desire and their organizing and directing ability, Labor would grope blindly in the dark by wasteful methods to the production of insufficient quantities of undesirable products. The Marxian[2] conception of an economic surplus wrongfully withheld from Labor which produces it is the disordered fancy of a fine intellect hopelessly warped by the contemplation of human misery and humanitarian sympathy with human distress. All economic discussion is worthless if tainted by human sympathy. The surplus value in production is trifling and seems large only because concentrated in comparatively few hands. The surplus of ages is concentrated in the structures which we see all about us, and in the commodities ready or partly ready for consumption and which will disappear in a short time. The annual accretions are small for an enormous amount of human effort is wastefully directed. That more effort is not wasted is due to the increasing necessities of an increasing population stimulating the most competent by the hope of personal gain to provide new means and new methods whereby those necessities may be served. No stimulus other than the hope of personal gain has ever been found effective to inspire this effort, or make it successful. Government administration invents nothing. It copies tardily and administers wastefully. Direction falls to those who compete successfully in talk not to those who demonstrate resourcefulness and masterfulness in forseeing human requirements, utilizing available means for supplying them, and effectiveness in least wastefully directing labor in the use of these means. Our Captains of Industry are those who for the most part starting life with nothing but a sound mind in a strong body have risen to the direction of great affairs through unrestricted opportunity to strenuously compete through long hours of hard labor and the mental and bodily strength to endure it. There is no reason to suppose that any other method than the same strenuous and unrestricted competition would produce men equal to such responsibilities, or that any inspiration but the hope of personal gain would induce such effort. The contention that the honor of direction and the applause of the multitude would incite to the necessary competition is not sound. In the first place long years of inconspicuous service but with the same eager effort are essential preliminaries to the great places which but few can reach, and secondly the honor would go as it does now in public affairs, not to the man efficient in industry, but to the man efficient in talk. The one stimulus to personal exertion which Nature supplies, and the only stimulus which operates powerfully, and universally and continuously is the desire of personal gain coupled with