porations at the head of which are big capitalists who hold out some kinds of guaranty or promise as to results. But the safer the corporation the more is the investor, not only the bondholder but even the stockholder, reduced to the position of a person who lends his money to it, at least as far as the amount of profits he receives on his capital is concerned. This can be seen any day on the stock exchange. The safer the corporation the more is the dividend reduced to the level of mere interest. In speaking of dividend in this connection we mean, of course, the amount of the dividend as a percentage on the capital invested. Sometimes a very safe corporation pays very large dividends (although this is unusual), but in such an event the value of the stock will be so much above par as to bring the dividend down to the proper level. The small capitalist who desires to invest in a corporation is, therefore, between the Scylla of taking all sorts of risks which are not present in the case of the independent industrial undertaker, and the Charybdis of getting no return on his capital except interest.
But as interest is only a share of the whole profit, and usually a small one at that, it is very evident that not all, and not even most, of the capitalists who possess sufficient capital to furnish them an independent income at the prevailing rates of profit, if they could remain independent undertakers, will be able to derive such income as stockholders of a corporation. A good many of them will necessarily have to fall out at the bottom. Usually these are the people who furnish the capital for all sorts of venturesome schemes with alluring promises, which result disastrously. Being unable to maintain their position as capitalists by investing in safe corporations, they desperately risk their small capitals in these undertakings, hoping to retrieve by a stroke of luck what they lost by the force of economic evolution.
But this is not yet all. Those smaller capitalists whose capital is for the time being sufficient to maintain them as rentiers of capitalism, as investors in safe corporations, are
