Last April I travelled with two hundred young lawbreakers a journey of eighty miles, from New York up into Orange County, to the site of a new reformatory, under the management of the City of New York. These "tough guys" of the city streets were being transported, without chains, without handcuffs, and without a gun in the pocket of any of the ten guards. On the boat, coming down the East River, the boys were as lively as if on an ordinary excursion. I stopped in front of one lad, who was entertaining his mates with a particularly fine bit of finger-whistling. Admiringly, I said to the boy: "That's fine. I wish I could do that!" And there came from him the simple reply: "Every feller's got some talent to him!"

That's the keynote of the prison of the future! Every fellow, every inmate has some talent. And to bring it out, and to make of it an economic asset to the fellow himself and to his country, every guard and every other prison officer, up to the warden, must have "some talent to him" in the administration of these future universities of Another Chance. For the prisoner is entitled to a good chance, both inside and outside the prison. He may come out of prison highly enthusiastic to make good. But he will find the life after prison hard, and for a considerable time filled with drudgery and worry. He must be equipped with sufficient stamina to meet these difficulties. The best preparation for the years after prison is the habit of hard work, reinforced by good standards of conduct. These the prison must give him.

MAKING TOO MUCH PROFIT

HE day before yesterday I bought a notebook for

THE thirty-three cents, the like of which had always

before cost me a simple quarter of a dollar. The salesman was not apologetic at all. He took the rhetorically correct position of assuming that, as a wide-awake business man, I was familiar with the trend of prices. He put it across very well, giving me a little glow of satisfaction at being recognized as broad-minded and up to date.

But I am not ready to believe that the stationer raised his prices because he was compelled to. I will admit the probable fact that he did have to raise them or make less money; but that was not the determining factor. Two changes had come about: one in the prices the retailer pays to the people who supply him, one in the state of mind of the buying public. For the sake of having figures, say the book costs the stationer twenty cents now, increased from sixteen. On the other hand I have come of late to be reconciled to paying as much as thirty-three cents for what used to be a twenty-five cent book.

Of course in their causes and effects these elements are badly tangled, but to the stationer they are two entirely distinct phenomena affecting his business on two opposite sides. If the increased cost to him had come through some freak of the trade, in a time of depression, and we customers had stubbornly declined to see that the book was not still a twenty-five cent book, would he have refused to supply us, for the reason that his gross margin had fallen from nine cents to five? If some happy accident had operated this year to keep the wholesale price of the book where it had been, while we were all acquiring the habit of paying thirty-three cents or thereabout for twenty-five cent paper goods, giving the dealer a chance

to take a little of what he calls "velvet," would he have denied himself?

The opportunity is the thing; not the need. Otherwise low-priced labor would be on strike all the time; high-priced labor never.

I say he advanced the price because he could. But do not blame him. Let him have his taste of chicken now (to use another elegant figure of the counting room). A couple of years back his diet was mostly feathers.

A big thing that helps to keep open the chasm of misunderstanding between the amateur and the professional in the industrial field is the feeling on the part of the amateur that the professional deals the game to suit himself - that he is responsible for all the effects and for all the things that look like effects. I say amateur, not academic; because the college professor seems to get nearer the truth than the run of writers and editors and legislators. The abstract theory of economics, from Adam Smith down, is closer to the actual than are the assumptions of our anti-trust legislation, or most of the arguments for communal ownership of public utilities.

The Outlook for June twenty-eighth says the railways make the usual claim that they must increase rates if their pay-rolls are increased, and continues, with an exclamation point: "No one ever seems to think a reduction of profits or even increase in economies is conceivable!"

Never mind the railways. They are in an exceedingly special and doubtless an uncomfortable predicament. The allusion is a general one.

The rejoinder is so simple that it almost seems discourteous. Are we to expect that men who are enlisted to maintain profits will agree with a wave of the hand to their reduction? Shall we assume that the men who are now giving their lives to the effecting of economies in industry, are not trying?

If the editor of The Outlook had time for this debate,

we should expect him to say that heads of corporations should consider themselves trustees for the public; and to mention the possibilities of scientific management.

The trustee-for-the-public idea, as an abstract proposition, is all right. It is just as good as the idea that any man must be happy if he has a chance to work hard all the time, because of the inherent nobility of labor. But shut your eyes and put yourself under the influence of common sense long enough to realize that a director is a human being, and then follow this.

I have fifty thousand dollars in money. No matter now how I got it. It is mine. No matter what anarchy may be approaching, this money is in my pocket to-day. I have liberty to spend it, if I like, in any way I like. I may buy a big car and drive it all over the world; stop at the best place in every town. I may go and shoot tigers. I may follow the fishing season up and down the country until I get tired of it. I may pick out the spot I like best in all the world, and go and loaf there (socialism holding off) the rest of my life. I have a perfect legal right and a pretty plausible moral right to have one almighty good time throwing that money at the birds.

But I do not throw it. I let it be used to help build a factory. You see that immediately we make jobs for people, construction gangs and so on, and they spend their wages, put money in circulation, and all that. But never mind that. That is the smallest part of it. We believe we are helping everyone in the community, excepting our competitors. When a new buyer enters a market, his bidding operates to raise prices. When a new seller comes, the pressure is downward. We enter the labor market as a buyer, the consumers' market as a seller. Every man or woman who comes to work for us comes of his own free choice, to better himself, because he judges we are offering him a more satisfying situation, all in all, than any one else. Every customer who comes to buy decides in his best judgment that we are offering better

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value than he can get his hands on elsewhere. If we were not in business if we had exercised our option of enjoying the spending of our money both wage earner and consumer must have been content with something not quite so desirable. The logic of this is plenty strong enough to convince me the director that the existence of our concern is a boon to the community, no matter what gain we may incidentally secure for ourselves.

Market conditions force us to this helpful position, and any claim that we are bound to go further, to do even better by labor or by the public than we must, at the expense of our profit, is simply an argument that selected fortunate individuals should give alms to selected individuals of the less fortunate. That question we are not taking up. We are trying only to get you to see the question for what it truly is. It is not a question of justice. Our profit, if we have one, which is rather dubious, has not been taken from any man's pocket. We feel that we created it, as truly as if we had persuaded two stalks of corn to grow where one grew before.

Our expense is a swelling, squirming thing imprisoned between relentless boundaries that tend always to draw closer the market where we buy and the market where we sell. We achieve a profit only by compressing the expense to make room for it. If one of the limits by chance does give back for the moment, we take the advantage thankfully; frankly, because we relish profit. We like what postpones the ever threatening day that is to force us out of business. We do not always see that a comfortable profit this one season is conclusive argument for more of an increase in wages than is required to hold our men; we have the habit of thinking in decades rather than in years, and we know too well that good measure of profit is a fleeting thing, while increased wages come to stay. In any event, we feel that we are far from blameworthy: because, so long as we continue buying and