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 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.