Field was one of the biggest dry goods manufacturers in the world. He owned, says a writer, scores of enormous factories in England, Ireland and Scotland. "The provinces of France," this eulogist goes on, "are dotted with his mills. The clatter of the Marshall Field looms is heard in Spain, Italy, Germany, Austria and Russia. Nor is the Orient neglected by this master of fabrics. Plodding Chinese and the skilled Japs are numbered by the thousands on the payroll of the Chicago merchant and manufacturer. On the other side of the equator are vast woolen mills in Australia, and the chain extends to South America, with factories in Brazil and in other of our neighboring republics."
In all of these factories the labor of men, women and children was harshly exploited; in nearly all of them the workers were in an unorganized state, and therefore deprived of every vestige of self-protection. Boys and girls of tenderest age were mercilessly ground into dollars; their young life's blood dyed deep the fabrics which brought Field riches. In this dehumanizing business Field was only doing what the entire commercial aristocracy the world over was doing.
How extraordinarily profitable the business of Marshall Field & Co. was (and is), may be seen in the fact that its shares (it became an incorporated stock company) were worth $1,000 each. At his death Marshall Field owned 3,400 of these shares, which the executors of his estate valued at $3,400,000. That the exploitation of labor, the sale of sweatshop and adulterated goods, and many other forms of oppression or fraud were a consecutive and integral part of his business methods is undeniable. But other factors, distinctly under the ban of the law, afford an additional explanation of how he was able to undersell petty competitors, situated