nto 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 workingmen of the time in which our laws were
framed knew anything about. A little group of workingmen, 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, any more than you ever saw a government. Many a
workingman to-day never saw the body of men who are conducting the
industry in which he is employed. And they never saw him. What they know
about him is written in ledgers and books and letters, in the
correspondence of the office, in the reports of the superintendents. He is
a long way off from them.

So what we have to discuss is, not wrongs which individuals intentionally
do,--I do not believe there are a great many of those,--but the wrongs of
a system. I want to record my protest against any discussion of this
matter which would seem to indicate that there are bodies of our
fellow-citizens who are trying to grind us down and do us injustice. There
are some men of that sort. I don't know how they sleep o' nights, but
there are men of that kind. Thank God, they are not numerous. The truth
is, we are all caught in a great economic system which is heartless. The
modern corporation is not engaged in business as an individual. When we
deal with it, we deal with an impersonal element, an immaterial piece of
society. A modern corporation is a means of co-operation in the conduct of
an enterprise which is so big that no one man can conduct it, and which
the resources of no one man are sufficient to finance. A company is
formed; that company puts out a prospectus; the promoters expect to raise
a certain fund as capital stock. Well, how are they going to raise it?
They are going to raise it from the public in general, some of whom will
buy their stock. The moment that begins, there is formed--what? A joint
stock corporation. Men begin to pool their earnings, little piles, big
p