Profits — Private profit is far less a private right than a public necessity.  Its absence would involve a waste which Society could not endure.  With individual operations controlled by fallible men enormous waste is inevitable.  It is essential to Society that this waste be minimized.  No industrial or commercial enterprise can go on without risk.  Profit is the compensation for risk.  One of the things which I believe, but which cannot be proved, is that from the dawn of history losses to individuals by which Society gained have exceeded profits to individuals, and the excess of these losses is the Social accumulation, increased, of course, by residues left after individuals have got what they could.  Whitney died poor, but mankind has the cotton-gin.  Bell died rich, but there is a profit to mankind in the telephone.  Socialists propose to assume risks and absorb profits.  I do not believe Society could afford this.  I am profoundly convinced that under the Socialist program the inevitable waste would be so enormously increased as to result in disaster approaching a Social cataclysm.  This is an old argument whose validity Socialists scout.  Nevertheless I believe it sound.  The number of these whose intellectual and physical strength is sufficient for the wisest direction of great enterprises is very small.  Some who are interested in our great industrial trusts are said to carry heavy insurance on the life of Mr. Morgan, lest he die and leave no successor.  If the natural ability is found its possessor will probably lack the knowledge which Mr. Morgan[4] has accumulated, and in the light of which he directs his operations.  It is essential that great operations — and the business of the future will be conducted on a great scale — be directed by great wisdom and power.  The possessors of high qualities we now discover by the trying-out process.  They can be discovered in no other way, and great effort can be secured only by the hope of great reward.  Until human nature changes we can expect nothing different.  Socialism implies popular selection of industrial leadership.  Wherever tried thus far in the world’s history there has usually been abject failure.  The mass can choose leaders in emotion but not directors of industry.  The selection of experts by the non-expert can be wise only by accident.  If the selection is not popular, then Socialism is tyranny, as its enemies charge.  If it be popular, or in so far as it is popular, direction is likely to fall to the great persuaders and not to the great directors.  Never did a “peoples party” yet escape the control of the unscrupulous.  No political movements result in so much political and Social rascality as so-called popular movements originated by earnest and honest men.  I see no reason to suppose that the Socialistic direction of industrial affairs in any city would be directed from any other source than the back rooms of the saloons where political movements are now shaped.  If the Socialistic program were