ies. For
the personal bond between the owner and the employees was substituted a
new relation. "In most parts of our country," as President Wilson once
said, "men work, not for themselves, not as partners in the old way in
which they used to work, but generally as employees--in a higher or
lower grade--of great corporations." The owner disappeared from the
factory and in his place came the manager, representing the usually
invisible stockholders and dependent for his success upon his ability to
make profits for the owners. Hence the term "soulless corporation,"
which was to exert such a deep influence on American thinking about
industrial relations.

=Cities and Immigration.=--Expressed in terms of human life, this era of
unprecedented enterprise meant huge industrial cities and an immense
labor supply, derived mainly from European immigration. Here, too,
figures tell only a part of the story. In Washington's day nine-tenths
of the American people were engaged in agriculture and lived in the
country; in 1890 more than one-third of the population dwelt in towns of
2500 and over; in 1920 more than half of the population lived in towns
of over 2500. In forty years, between 1860 and 1900, Greater New York
had grown from 1,174,000 to 3,437,000; San Francisco from 56,000 to
342,000; Chicago from 109,000 to 1,698,000. The miles of city tenements
began to rival, in the number of their residents, the farm homesteads of
the West. The time so dreaded by Jefferson had arrived. People were
"piled upon one another in great cities" and the republic of small
farmers had passed away.

To these industrial centers flowed annually an ever-increasing tide of
immigration, reaching the half million point in 1880; rising to
three-quarters of a million three years later; and passing the million
mark in a single year at the opening of the new century. Immigration was
as old as America but new elements now entered the situation. In the
first place, there were radical changes in the nationality of the
newcomers. The migration from Northern Europe--England, Ireland,
Germany, and Scandinavia--diminished; that from Italy, Russia, and
Austria-Hungary increased, more than three-fourths of the entire number
coming from these three lands between the years 1900 and 1910. These
later immigrants were Italians, Poles, Magyars, Czechs, Slovaks,
Russians, and Jews, who came from countries far removed from the
language and the traditions of England whence cam