Yesterday, and ever since history began, men were related to one another as
individuals. To be sure there were the family, the Church, and the State,
institutions which associated men in certain wide circles of relationship.
But in the ordinary concerns of life, in the ordinary work, in the daily
round, men dealt freely and directly with one another. To-day, the everyday
relationships of men are largely with great impersonal concerns, with
organizations, not with other individual men.

Now this is nothing short of a new social age, a new era of human
relationships, a new stage-setting for the drama of life.

In this new age we find, for instance, that our laws with regard to the
relations of employer and employee are in many respects wholly antiquated and
impossible. They were framed for another age, which nobody now living
remembers, which is, indeed, so remote from our life that it would be
difficult for many of us to understand it if it were described to us. The
employer is now generally a corporation or a huge company of some kind; the
employee is one of hundreds or of thousands brought together, not by
individual masters whom they know and with whom they have personal relations,
but by agents of one sort or another. Workingmen are marshaled in great
numbers for the performance of a multitude of particular tasks under a common
discipline. They generally use dangerous and powerful machinery, over whose
repair and renewal they have no control. New rules must be devised with
regard to their obligations and their rights, their obligations to their
employers and their responsibilities to one another. Rules must be devised
for their protection, for their compensation when injured, for their support
when disabled.

There is something very new and very big and very complex about these new
relations of capital and labor. A new economic society has sprung up, and we
must effect a new set of adjustments. We must not pit power against 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.