Читать книгу The industrial republic: a study of the America of ten years hence онлайн

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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.