weakness. The employer is generally, in our day, as I have said, not an
individual, but a powerful group; and yet the workingman when dealing with
his employer is still, under our existing law, an individual.

Why is it that we have a labor question at all? It is for the simple and
very sufficient reason that the laboring man and the employer are not
intimate associates now as they used to be in time past. Most of our laws
were formed in the age when employer and employees knew each other, knew
each other's characters, were associates with each other, dealt with each
other as man with man. That is no longer the case. You not only do not
come into personal contact with the men who have the supreme command in
those corporations, but it would be out of the question for you to do it.
Our modern corporations employ thousands, and in some instances hundreds
of thousands, of men. The only persons whom you see or deal with are local
superintendents or local representatives of a vast organization, which is
not like anything that the workingmen of the time in which our laws were
framed knew anything about. A little group of workingmen, seeing their
employer every day, dealing with him in a personal way, is one thing, and
the modern body of labor engaged as employees of the huge enterprises that
spread all over the country, dealing with men of whom they can form no
personal conception, is another thing. A very different thing. You never
saw a corporation, any more than you ever saw a government. Many a
workingman to-day never saw the body of men who are conducting the
industry in which he is employed. And they never saw him. What they know
about him is written in ledgers and books and letters, in the
correspondence of the office, in the reports of the superintendents. He is
a long way off from them.

So what we have to discuss is, not wrongs which individuals intentionally
do,--I do not believe there are a great many of those,--but the wrongs of