paying for it all. The doors of waste and extravagance stand open, and
there seems to be a general agreement to squander and spend. It all
belongs to somebody. There is somebody who had to contribute it, and
who will have to find more. Nothing is ever said about him. Attention
is all absorbed by the clamorous interests, the importunate
petitioners, the plausible schemers, the pitiless bores. Now, who is
the victim? He is the Forgotten Man. If we go to find him, we shall
find him hard at work tilling the soil to get out of it the fund for
all the jobbery, the object of all the plunder, the cost of all the
economic quackery, and the pay of all the politicians and statesmen
who have sacrificed his interests to his enemies. We shall find him an
honest, sober, industrious citizen, unknown outside his little circle,
paying his debts and his taxes, supporting the church and the school,
reading his party newspaper, and cheering for his pet politician.

We must not overlook the fact that the Forgotten Man is not
infrequently a woman. I have before me a newspaper which contains five
letters from corset-stitchers who complain that they cannot earn more
than seventy-five cents a day with a machine, and that they have to
provide the thread. The tax on the grade of thread used by them is
prohibitory as to all importation, and it is the corset-stitchers who
have to pay day by day out of their time and labor the total
enhancement of price due to the tax. Women who earn their own living
probably earn on an average seventy-five cents per day of ten hours.
Twenty-four minutes' work ought to buy a spool of thread at the retail
price, if the American work-woman were allowed to exchange her labor
for thread on the best terms that the art and commerce of today would
allow; but after she has done twenty-four minutes' work for the thread
she is forced by the laws of her country to go back and work sixteen
minutes longer to pay the tax--that is, to support the thread-mill.