ector
and as an individual? They do not. Our laws still deal with us on the
basis of the old system. The law is still living in the dead past which
we have left behind. This is evident, for instance, with regard to the
matter of employers' liability for working men's injuries. Suppose that
a superintendent wants a workman to use a certain piece of machinery
which it is not safe for him to use, and that the workman is injured by
that piece of machinery. Our courts have held that the superintendent
is a fellow servant, or, as the law states it, a fellow employee, and
that, therefore, the man can not recover damages for his injury. The
superintendent who probably engaged the man is not his employer. Who is
his employer? And whose negligence could conceivably come in there? The
board of directors did not tell the employee to use that piece of
machinery; and the president of the corporation did not tell him to use
that piece of machinery. And so forth. Don't you see by that theory
that a man never can get redress for negligence on the part of the
employer? When I hear judges reason upon the analogy of the
relationships that used to exist between workmen and their employers a
generation ago, I wonder if they have not opened their eyes to the
modern world. You know, we have a right to expect that judges will have
their eyes open, even though the law which they administer hasn't
awakened.

Yet that is but a single small detail illustrative of the difficulties
we are in because we have not adjusted the law to the facts of the new
order.

Since I entered politics, I have chiefly had men's views confided to me
privately. Some of the biggest men in the United States, in the field
of commerce and manufacture, are afraid of somebody, are afraid of
something. They know that there is a power somewhere so organized, so
subtle, so watchful, so interlocked, so complete, so pervasive, that
they had better not speak above their breath when they speak in
condemnation of it.

They know that America is not a place of which it can be said, as it
used to be, that a man may choose his own calling and pursue it just so
far as his abilities enable him to pursue it; because to-day, if he
enters certain fields, there are organizations which will use means
against him that will prevent his building up a business which they do
not want to have built up; organizations that will see to it that the
ground is cut from under him and the markets shut aga