Educational Review (Volume 26)

Book may have numerous typos, missing text, images, or index. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. 1903. Excerpt: ... give the producer a higher reward, and share with the consumer by lowering the price of the finished product to him. For the performance of this function capital collects its tithes. It gets perhaps a tenth of what it saves, distributing on an average the other nine-tenths to the producers and the consumers. In our day the enormous aggregates of capital are hastening forward this beneficent process with ever increasing speed. It is, of course, out of place to consider here the fact that so important and radical a transformation as results from this great process necessarily involves much evil and much suffering to the human beings that are forced from the place of middle men to the place of end men. All readjustment of vocations involves inconvenience, and sometimes suffering, and even injustice. But we may remark that if a new investment of capital pays well for a while, it is constantly attacked by newer inventions and newer combinations which, being more economical than the old, that is to say, needing fewer middle men, cause the old investment to pay less and less interest to the capital. Old investments, therefore, in capital are obliged constantly to divide with new combinations, and the producer and the consumer-- the end men--finally get all the profit. The inventions of fifty years ago are nearly all now the property of the community at large. Returning to our theme, endowments for education, we see what significance there is for the future of civilization in this accumulation of capital. For its accumulation stimulates the work of prospecting for natural resources, not only the home resources of the great nations, but the resources abroad in the world at large--the possible resources of all lands. Witness the acquisition of the oil lands, the deposits of gold, silver, and ...