The same causes have greatly reduced the independence of personal and family life.  In the eighteenth century life was simple.  The producer and consumer were near together and could find each other.  Every one who had an equivalent to give in property or service could readily secure the support of himself and his family without asking anything from government except the preservation of order.  To-day almost all Americans are dependent upon the action of a great number of other persons mostly unknown.  About half of our people are crowded into the cities and large towns.  Their food, clothes, fuel, light, water—­all come from distant sources, of which they are in the main ignorant, through a vast, complicated machinery of production and distribution with which they have little direct relation.  If anything occurs to interfere with the working of the machinery, the consumer is individually helpless.  To be certain that he and his family may continue to live he must seek the power of combination with others, and in the end he inevitably calls upon that great combination of all citizens which we call government to do something more than merely keep the peace—­to regulate the machinery of production and distribution and safeguard it from interference so that it shall continue to work.

A similar change has taken place in the conditions under which a great part of our people engage in the industries by which they get their living.  Under comparatively simple industrial conditions the relation between employer and employee was mainly a relation of individual to individual, with individual freedom of contract and freedom of opportunity essential to equality in the commerce of life.  Now, in the great manufacturing, mining, and transportation industries of the country, instead of the free give and take of individual contract there is substituted a vast system of collective bargaining between great masses of men organized and acting through their representatives, or the individual on the one side accepts what he can get from superior power on the other.  In the movement of these mighty forces of organization the individual laborer, the individual stockholder, the individual consumer, is helpless.

There has been another change of conditions through the development of political organization.  The theory of political activity which had its origin approximately in the administration of President Jackson, and which is characterized by Marcy’s declaration that “to the victors belong the spoils,” tended to make the possession of office the primary and all-absorbing purpose of political conflict.  A complicated system of party organization and representation grew up under which a disciplined body of party workers in each state supported each other, controlled the machinery of nomination, and thus controlled nominations.  The members of state legislatures and other officers, when elected, felt a more acute responsibility to the organization which could control their renomination