Now, do the workingmen employed by that stock corporation deal with that president and those directors?  Not at all.  Does the public deal with that president and that board of directors?  It does not.  Can anybody bring them to account?  It is next to impossible to do so.  If you undertake it you will find it a game of hide and seek, with the objects of your search taking refuge now behind the tree of their individual personality, now behind that of their corporate irresponsibility.

And do our laws take note of this curious state of things?  Do they even attempt to distinguish between a man’s act as a corporation director and as an individual?  They do not.  Our laws still deal with us on the basis of the old system.  The law is still living in the dead past which we have left behind.  This is evident, for instance, with regard to the matter of employers’ liability for workingmen’s injuries.  Suppose that a superintendent wants a workman to use a certain piece of machinery which it is not safe for him to use, and that the workman is injured by that piece of machinery.  Some of our courts have held that the superintendent is a fellow-servant, or, as the law states it, a fellow-employee, and that, therefore, the man cannot recover damages for his injury.  The superintendent who probably engaged the man is not his employer.  Who is his employer?  And whose negligence could conceivably come in there?  The board of directors did not tell the employee to use that piece of machinery; and the president of the corporation did not tell him to use that piece of machinery.  And so forth.  Don’t you see by that theory that a man never can get redress for negligence on the part of the employer?  When I hear judges reason upon the analogy of the relationships that used to exist between workmen and their employers a generation ago, I wonder if they have not opened their eyes to the modern world.  You know, we have a right to expect that judges will have their eyes open, even though the law which they administer hasn’t awakened.

Yet that is but a single small detail illustrative of the difficulties we are in because we have not adjusted the law to the facts of the new order.

* * * * *

Since I entered politics, I have chiefly had men’s views confided to me privately.  Some of the biggest men in the United States, in the field of commerce and manufacture, are afraid of somebody, are afraid of something.  They know that there is a power somewhere so organized, so subtle, so watchful, so interlocked, so complete, so pervasive, that they had better not speak above their breath when they speak in condemnation of it.

They know that America is not a place of which it can be said, as it used to be, that a man may choose his own calling and pursue it just as far as his abilities enable him to pursue it; because to-day, if he enters certain fields, there are organizations which will use means against him that will prevent his building up a business which they do not want to have built up; organizations that will see to it that the ground is cut from under him and the markets shut against him.  For if he begins to sell to certain retail dealers, to any retail dealers, the monopoly will refuse to sell to those dealers, and those dealers, afraid, will not buy the new man’s wares.