tablishments, was 24.68; and that in 1880 it
was 20.23. This means that the workingmen's share of the
returns of their own labor, so far from increasing, has
decreased one sixth in five years.

The workingman is disposed to believe in the light of such
figures that the large wealth accumulated by his employer
represents over and above a fair profit the increased wages
out of which he naturally regards himself as being mulcted.
He may be thick-headed, but he can see that in such a
see-saw of profits _versus_ wages the superior power of
capital has the odds all in its favor. He learns to regard
the whole state of the industrial world as one in which
_might_ makes _right_, and feebleness is the synonym of
fault.

How, in the name of all that is reasonable, can the average
man take much interest in his employer or identity himself
with that employer under such a state of things as the
economy sanctioned by the employer has taught him? This is
aggravated by the whole character of our modern industrial
system.

The factory system is a new feudalism, in which a master
rarely deals directly with his hands. Superintendents,
managers, and "bosses" stand between him and them. He does
not know them; they do not know him. The old common feeling
is disappearing. And--this is a significant point that it
behooves workingmen to notice--the intermediaries are
generally workingmen who have risen out of the ranks of
manual labor and have lost all fellow-feeling with their old
comrades, without gaining the larger sympathy with humanity
which often comes from better culture. The hardest men upon
workingmen are ex-workingmen. It is stated, on what seems to
be good authority, that the general superintendent of the
great corporation which lately has shown so hard a feeling
towards its operatives when on a strike was himself only ten
years ago a telegraph-operator.

A further aggravating feature of this problem is the
increasing tendency of capital to associated action. What
little knowledge of his employees or sympathy with them the
individual manufacturer might have is wholly lost in the
case of the corporation. To the stockholders of a great
joint-stock company, many of whom are never on the spot, the
hundreds of laborers employed by