s thing to note that when Senator Albert J. Beveridge
endeavored to have a Federal Bill passed at Washington, in Nineteen
Hundred Seven, the arguments he had to meet and answer were those which
Robert Owen and Sir Robert Peel were obliged to answer in Seventeen
Hundred Ninety-five.

When a man who worked a hundred orphans fourteen hours a day, boys and
girls of from six to twelve, was accused of cruelty, he defended himself
by saying, "If I doesn't work 'em all the time 'cept when they sleep and
eat, they will learn to play, and then never work." This argument was
repeated by many fond parents as conclusive.

The stress of the times--having many machines in one building, all run
by one motor power, the necessity of buying raw material in quantities,
the expense of finding a market--all these combined to force the
invention of a very curious economic expediency. It was called a Joint
Stock Company. From a man and his wife and his children making things at
home, we get two or three men going into partnership and hiring a few
of their neighbors at day wages.

Then we get the system of "shareholding," with hundreds or thousands of
people as partners in a manufacturing enterprise which they never visit.

The people who owned the shares were the ones who owned the tools. Very
naturally, they wanted and expected dividends for the use of the tools.
That was all they wanted--dividends. The manager of the mill held his
position only through his ability to make the venture bring returns. The
people who owned the shares or the tools, never saw the people who used
the tools. A great gulf lay between them. For the wrongs and injustices
visited upon the workers no one person was to blame. The fault was
shifted. Everybody justified himself. And then came the saying,
"Corporations have no souls."

Robert Owen was manager of a mill, yet he saw the misery, the ignorance
and the mental indifference that resulted from the factory system. He,
too, must produce dividends, but the desire of his heart was also to
mitigate the lot of the workers.

Books were written by good men picturing the evils of the factory
system. Comparisons were made between the old and the new, in which the
hideousness of the new was etched in biting phrase. Some tried to turn
the dial backward and revive the cottage industries, as did Ruskin a
little later. "A Dream of John Ball" was anticipated, and many sighed
for "the good old times."

But among the many phi