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 for themselves, not as partners in the old way in which they used to work, but 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, with deep mortification, to cooperate 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 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 limited circles of relationships.  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.  Working men are marshaled in great numbers for the