Sec. 5.  Irresponsibility of Employers.—­The third view of the sweating System lays stress upon its moral aspect, and finds its chief cause in the irresponsibility of the employer.  Now we have already seen that this severance of the personal relation between employer and employed is a necessary result of the establishment of the large factory as the industrial unit, and of the ever-growing complexity of modern commerce.  It is not merely that the widening gap of social position between employer and employed, and the increased number of the latter, make the previous close relation impossible.  Quite as important is the fact that the real employer in modern industry is growing more “impersonal.”  What we mean is this.  The nominal employer or manager is not the real employer.  The real employer of labour is capital, and it is to the owners of the capital in any business that we must chiefly look for the exercise of such responsibility as rightly subsists between employer and employed.  Now, while it is calculated that one-eighth of the business of England is in the hands of joint-stock companies, constituting far more than one-eighth of the large businesses, in the great majority of other cases, where business is conducted on a large scale, the head of the business is to a great extent a mere manager of other people’s capital.  Thus while the manager’s sense of personal responsibility is weakened by the number of “hands” whom he employs, his freedom of action is likewise crippled by his obligation to subserve the interests of a body of capitalists who are in ignorance of the very names and number of the human beings whose destiny they are controlling.  The severance of the real “employer” from his “hands” is thus far more complete than would appear from mere attention to the growth in the size of the average business.  Now it must not be supposed that this severance of the personal relation between employer and employed is of necessity a loss to the latter.  There is no reason to suppose that the close relation subsisting in the old days between the master and his journeymen and apprentices was as a rule idyllically beautiful.  No doubt the control of the master was often vexatious and despotic.  The tyranny of a heartless employer under the old system was probably much more injurious than the apathy of the most vulgar plutocrat of to-day.  The employe under the modern system is less subject to petty spite and unjust interference on the part of his employer.  In this sense he is more free.  But on the other hand, he has lost that guarantee against utter destitution and degradation afforded by the humanity of the better class of masters.  He has exchanged a human nexus for a “cash nexus.”  The nominal freedom of this cash relationship is in the case of the upper strata of workmen probably a real freedom; the irresponsibility of their employers has educated them to more self-reliance, and strengthened a healthy personality in them.  It is the lower