o progress not by ceasing to be wage-earners, but by
improving the conditions under which all the wage-earners in all the
industries of the country lived and worked, as well of course, as
improving their own individual efficiency.

Another change which had come about as a result of the foregoing was a
crass inequality in the bargaining relation between the employer and
the individual employee standing alone. The great coal-mining and
coal-carrying companies, which employed their tens of thousands, could
easily dispense with the services of any particular miner. The miner, on
the other hand, however expert, could not dispense with the companies.
He needed a job; his wife and children would starve if he did not get
one. What the miner had to sell--his labor--was a perishable commodity;
the labor of to-day--if not sold to-day--was lost forever. Moreover,
his labor was not like most commodities--a mere thing; it was part of
a living, breathing human being. The workman saw, and all citizens who
gave earnest thought to the matter saw, that the labor problem was not
only an economic, but also a moral, a human problem. Individually the
miners were impotent when they sought to enter a wage-contract with the
great companies; they could make fair terms only by uniting into trade
unions to bargain collectively. The men were forced to cooperate to
secure not only their economic, but their simple human rights. They,
like other workmen, were compelled by the very conditions under which
they lived to unite in unions of their industry or trade, and these
unions were bound to grow in size, in strength, and in power for good
and evil as the industries in which the men were employed grew larger
and larger.

A democracy can be such in fact only if there is some rough
approximation in similarity in stature among the men composing it. One
of us can deal in our private lives with the grocer or the butcher
or the carpenter or the chicken raiser, or if we are the grocer or
carpenter or butcher or farmer, we can deal with our customers, because
_we are all of about the same size_. Therefore a simple and poor society
can exist as a democracy on a basis of sheer individualism. But a rich
and complex industrial society cannot so exist; for some individuals,
and especially those artificial individuals called corporations, become
so very big that the ordinary individual is utterly dwarfed beside them,
and cannot deal with them on terms of equality. I