labor of millions of workers, men, women and children, of all occupations. By this simple screed, called a will, embodying one man's capricious indulgence, these boys, utterly incompetent even to grasp the magnitude of the fortune owned by them, and incapable of exercising the glimmerings of management, were given legal, binding power over a mass of people for generations. Patterson says that in the Field stores and Pullman factories fifty thousand people work for these boys.9 But these are the direct employees; as we have seen, Field owned bonds and stock in more than one hundred and fifty industrial, railroad, mining and other corporations. The workers of all these toil for the Field boys.
They delve in mines, and risk accident, disease and death, or suffer an abjectly lingering life of impoverishment. Thousands of coal miners are killed every year, and many thousands more are injured, in order that two boys and others of their class may draw huge profits.10 More than 10,000 persons are killed, and 97,000 injured, every year on the railroads, so that the income enjoyed by these lads and others shall not diminish. Nearly all of these casualties are due to economizing in expense, working employees to an extreme fatiguing limit, and refusing to provide proper safety appliances. Millions more workers drudge in rolling mills, railroad shops and factories; they wear out their lives on farms, in packing houses and stores. For what? Why, foolish questioner, for the rudiments of an existence; do you not know that the world's dispossessed must pay heavily for the privilege of living? As these lads hold, either wholly or partly, the titles to all this inherited property; in plain words, to a formidable part of the machinery of business, the millions of workers must sweat and bend the back, and pile up a ceaseless flow of riches for them.