Yet, this is precisely what the Socialists do when they commence to quote “facts.” It is useless for them to deny the charge, for there is no other method by which they can figure an average earning capacity of $2,500 for each worker. To do this it would be necessary for the employer to get his cotton for nothing, his leather for nothing, and everything he uses in making his product, for nothing. Moreover, it presupposes that he can procure free fuel, free light, and, what is still more improbable, that he has to pay nothing for new machinery or for repairing the old. Do you think that the Socialist is showing himself the “friend” of the worker when he fills his mind with such “dope” as this? And, even, the figures we have worked out are not fair--to the employer. He does not make a profit of more than $299 upon the labor of each of his workers--not by any means! Out of the $299 must come the cost of selling and transportation, bad debts, taxes, interest, etc., so that, when we have deducted all these charges, we can scarcely question Willey’s justification for the assertion (“Laborer and the Capitalist,” p. 22) that capital actually receives no more than 6 per cent net profits on its product. Moreover, as _The American Federationist_ points out (July, 1905), the census figures fall short of giving us the actual cost of manufactures, as the original “gross value” upon which our calculations are based is itself “arrived at by a constant duplication of value, owing to the fact that the finished products of one plant become the material of some other factory, in which they are changed into some higher form and again included in the value of products.” I will admit that it is practically impossible to compile statistics that will take such facts as these into consideration, and the Socialists do not act fairly when they lead us to assume that all these conditions have been considered in their figures. How many times do you suppose the value of the same piece of leather is computed from the time it becomes a hide until it is turned out, a finished product, from the shoe factory. Yet, as we have seen, every time the value of this material is included in the value of products it gives the manufacturer credit for a sum of money that never reached him.