o be
mandatory--employers and employees alike regulated by its iron authority
all their dealings with one another, throwing off the immemorial relations
of mutual dependence and mutual esteem as tending to interfere with
beneficent operation. The employer came to believe conscientiously that it
was not only profitable and expedient, but under all circumstances his
duty, to obtain his labor for as little money as possible, even as he sold
its product for as much. Considerations of humanity were not banished from
his heart, but most sternly excluded from his business. Many of these
misguided men would give large sums to various charities; would found
universities, hospitals, libraries; would even stop on their way to
relieve beggars in the street; but for their own work-people they had no
care. Straman relates in his "Memoirs" that a wealthy manufacturer once
said to one of his mill-hands who had asked for an increase of his wages
because unable to support his family on the pay that he was getting: "Your
family is nothing to me. I cannot afford to mix benevolence with my
business." Yet this man, the author adds, had just given a thousand
_drusoes_ to a "sea-man's home." He could afford to care for other men's
employees, but not for his own. He could not see that the act which he
performed as truly, and to the same degree, cut down his margin of profit
in his business as the act which he refused to perform would have done,
and had not the advantage of securing him better service from a grateful
workman.

On their part the laborers were no better. Their relations to their
employers being "purely commercial," as it was called, they put no heart
into their work, seeking ever to do as little as possible for their money,
precisely as their employers sought to pay as little as possible for the
work they got. The interests of the two classes being thus antagonized,
they grew to distrust and hate each other, and each accession of ill
feeling produced acts which tended to broaden the breach more and more.
There was neither cheerful service on the one side nor ungrudging payment
on the other.

The harder industrial conditions generated by woman's irruption into a new
domain of activity produced among laboring men a feeling of blind
discontent and concern. Like all men in apprehension, they drew together
for mutual protection, they knew not clearly against what. They formed
"labor unions," and believed them to be something new and e