he employer is now generally a corporation or a huge
company of some kind; the employee is one of hundreds or of thousands
brought together, not by individual masters whom they know and with
whom they have personal relations, but by agents of one sort or
another. Working men are marshaled in great numbers for the performance
of a multitude of particular tasks under a common discipline. They
generally use dangerous and powerful machinery, over whose repair and
renewal they have no control. New rules must be devised with regard to
their obligations and their rights, their obligations to their
employers and their responsibilities to one another. New rules must be
devised for their protection, for their compensation when injured, for
their support when disabled.

There is something very new and very big and very complex about these
new relations of capital and labor. A new economic society has sprung
up, and we must effect a new set of adjustments. We must not pit power
against weakness. The employer is generally, in our day, as I have
said, not an individual, but a powerful group; and yet the working man
when dealing with his employer is still, under our existing law, an
individual.

Why is it that we have a labor question at all? It is for the simple
and very sufficient reason that the laboring man and the employer are
not intimate associates now, as they used to be in time past. Most of
our laws were formed in the age when employer and employees knew each
other, knew each other's characters, were associates with each other,
dealt with each other as man with man. That is no longer the case. You
not only do not come into personal contact with the men who have the
supreme command in those corporations, but it would be out of the
question for you to do it. Our modern corporations employ thousands,
and in some instances hundreds of thousands, of men. The only persons
whom you see or deal with are local superintendents or local
representatives of a vast organization, which is not like anything that
the working men of the time in which our laws were framed knew anything
about. A little group of working men, seeing their employer every day,
dealing with him in a personal way, is one thing, and the modern body
of labor engaged as employees of the huge enterprises that spread all
over the country, dealing with men of whom they can form no personal
conception, is another thing. A very different thing. You never saw a
corporation,