But intellects vary in character and usefulness, and let us try by differentiation and elimination to isolate and consider those particular classes of intellect whose activities bear most directly on the questions raised by Socialistic theory.  The chiefs are the devotees of pure science — the Galileos, the Newtons, the Pasteurs, the Faradays, the Kelvins, and the innumerable company of those like them, many known but most unknown, who spend their days and nights in the search for truth.  They deserve and get the greatest of rewards which is the respect and admiration of their fellowman.  As for material things, they desire and get very little.  Following them are the magnates of applied science, the Watts, the Stephensons, the Bells, the Edisons, and their like, who apply to beneficial use the discoveries of the great lights of pure science often with prodigious material profit to themselves.  The patent offices know them all, big and little.  They perform a magnificent service, are highly esteemed in their day and generation and their material rewards are great.  And upon the whole the world does not grudge them what they get.

But there are others.  Next after the magnates of applied science in public estimation, but of equal economic importance, I would place the Captains of Industry.  Without their grasp of human necessity and desire and their organizing and directing ability, Labor would grope blindly in the dark by wasteful methods to the production of insufficient quantities of undesirable products.  The Marxian[2] conception of an economic surplus wrongfully withheld from Labor which produces it is the disordered fancy of a fine intellect hopelessly warped by the contemplation of human misery and humanitarian sympathy with human distress.  All economic discussion is worthless if tainted by human sympathy.  The surplus value in production is trifling and seems large only because concentrated in comparatively few hands.  The surplus of ages is concentrated in the structures which we see all about us, and in the commodities ready or partly ready for consumption and which will disappear in a short time.  The annual accretions are small for an enormous amount of human effort is wastefully directed.  That more effort is not wasted is due to the increasing necessities of an increasing population stimulating the most competent by the hope of personal gain to provide new means and new methods whereby those necessities may be served.  No stimulus other than the hope of personal gain has ever been found effective to inspire this effort, or make it successful.  Government administration invents nothing.  It copies tardily and administers wastefully.  Direction falls to those who compete successfully in talk not to those who demonstrate resourcefulness and masterfulness in forseeing human requirements, utilizing available means for supplying them, and effectiveness in least wastefully directing labor in the use of these means.  Our Captains of Industry