Is Willing To Pay &100

For a Ton of Coal if Competition Causes It

PROF. TAYLOR'S IDEAS

On the Coal Question Possesses the Merit of Originality - Apparently Believes in Combinations

That anyone should be willing to pay $100 a ton for coal and not complain will probably be wondered at, especially at this period, but Prof. F. M. Taylor, "for the magnates to get any price that competition will allow. It is bitter to take my own medicine, yet I should not object to any price made by competition; not even if I had to pay $100 a ton for coal."

"You will notice that a jury in Chicago has returned indictments against the coal dealers. Yet the jury has admitted that for all the high prices coal cars are coming into Chicago as fast as human strength can bring them. The jury has not found that the coal dealers had any criminal intentions. I do not contend that the price which any monopoly makes is just, but I do not fear monopoly prices."

Prof. Taylor contends that the poor would be immeasurably worse off than they are were it not for the present high price of coal, and that were it not for the rise in price there would be a lot of people nearer freezing than there are today. He believes that a low price of coal would have ended disastrously because the rich or those who had a little money to invest would have bought all the coal in that event and the market would have bought up all the coal in that event and the market would have been left without any. The sharp rise in price, says the professor, has served to keep the coal somewhat fairly distributed among the different factors of society.