very structure and operation of society
itself, of which government is only the instrument. Our development has
run so fast and so far along the lines sketched in the earlier day of
constitutional definition, has so crossed and interlaced those lines, has
piled upon them such novel structures of trust and combination, has
elaborated within them a life so manifold, so full of forces which
transcend the boundaries of the country itself and fill the eyes of the
world, that a new nation seems to have been created which the old formulas
do not fit or afford a vital interpretation of.

We have come upon a very different age from any that preceded us. We have
come upon an age when we do not do business in the way in which we used to
do business,--when we do 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, not for themselves, not
as partners in the old way in which they used to work, but generally 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 oftentimes with deep mortification to co-operate 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 a 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