o not carry on any of the operations of
manufacture, sale, transportation, or communication as men used to
carry them on. There is a sense in which in our day the individual has
been submerged. In most parts of our country men work for themselves,
not as partners in the old way in which they used to work, but as
employees--in a higher or lower grade--of great corporations. There was
a time when corporations played a very minor part in our business
affairs, but now they play the chief part, and most men are the
servants of corporations.

You know what happens when you are the servant of a corporation. You
have in no instance access to the men who are really determining the
policy of the corporation. If the corporation is doing the things that
it ought not to do, you really have no voice in the matter and must
obey the orders, and you have, with deep mortification, to cooperate in
the doing of things which you know are against the public interest.
Your individuality is swallowed up in the individuality and purpose of
a great organization.

It is true that, while most men are thus submerged in the corporation,
a few, a very few, are exalted to power which as individuals they could
never have wielded. Through the great organizations of which they are
the heads, a few are enabled to play a part unprecedented by anything
in history in the control of the business operations of the country and
in the determination of the happiness of great numbers of people.

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 limited
circles of relationships. 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. T