wide circles of
relationship. But in the ordinary concerns of life, in the ordinary work,
in the daily round, men dealt freely and directly with one another.
To-day, the everyday relationships of men are largely with great
impersonal concerns, with organizations, not with other individual men.

Now this is nothing short of a new social age, a new era of human
relationships, a new stage-setting for the drama of life.

* * * * *

In this new age we find, for instance, that our laws with regard to the
relations of employer and employee are in many respects wholly antiquated
and impossible. They were framed for another age, which nobody now living
remembers, which is, indeed, so remote from our life that it would be
difficult for many of us to understand it if it were described to us. The
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. Workingmen 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.
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 workingman 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 i