dealing of great bodies of men with other bodies of men is a matter of
public scrutiny, and should be a matter of public regulation.

Similarly, it was no business of the law in the time of Jefferson to come
into my house and see how I kept house. But when my house, when my
so-called private property, became a great mine, and men went along dark
corridors amidst every kind of danger in order to dig out of the bowels of
the earth things necessary for the industries of a whole nation, and when
it came about that no individual owned these mines, that they were owned
by great stock companies, then all the old analogies absolutely collapsed
and it became the right of the government to go down into these mines to
see whether human beings were properly treated in them or not; to see
whether accidents were properly safeguarded against; to see whether modern
economical methods of using these inestimable riches of the earth were
followed or were not followed. If somebody puts a derrick improperly
secured on top of a building or overtopping the street, then the
government of the city has the right to see that that derrick is so
secured that you and I can walk under it and not be afraid that the
heavens are going to fall on us. Likewise, in these great beehives where
in every corridor swarm men of flesh and blood, it is the privilege of the
government, whether of the State or of the United States, as the case may
be, to see that human life is protected, that human lungs have something
to breathe.

These, again, are merely illustrations of conditions. We are in a new
world, struggling under old laws. As we go inspecting our lives to-day,
surveying this new scene of centralized and complex society, we shall find
many more things out of joint.

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