There was, of course, another side to the picture.  Many of the corporations sought to become monopolies and to make profits, not by economies and good management, but by extortion from purchasers.  Sometimes they mercilessly crushed small business men, their competitors, bribed members of legislatures to secure favorable laws, and contributed to the campaign funds of both leading parties.  Wherever a trust approached the position of a monopoly, it acquired a dominion over the labor market which enabled it to break even the strongest trade unions.  In short, the power of the trust in finance, in manufacturing, in politics, and in the field of labor control can hardly be measured.

=The Corporation and Labor.=—­In the development of the corporation there was to be observed a distinct severing of the old ties between master and workmen, which existed in the days of small industries.  For the personal bond between the owner and the employees was substituted a new relation.  “In most parts of our country,” as President Wilson once said, “men work, not for themselves, not as partners in the old way in which they used to work, but generally as employees—­in a higher or lower grade—­of great corporations.”  The owner disappeared from the factory and in his place came the manager, representing the usually invisible stockholders and dependent for his success upon his ability to make profits for the owners.  Hence the term “soulless corporation,” which was to exert such a deep influence on American thinking about industrial relations.

=Cities and Immigration.=—­Expressed in terms of human life, this era of unprecedented enterprise meant huge industrial cities and an immense labor supply, derived mainly from European immigration.  Here, too, figures tell only a part of the story.  In Washington’s day nine-tenths of the American people were engaged in agriculture and lived in the country; in 1890 more than one-third of the population dwelt in towns of 2500 and over; in 1920 more than half of the population lived in towns of over 2500.  In forty years, between 1860 and 1900, Greater New York had grown from 1,174,000 to 3,437,000; San Francisco from 56,000 to 342,000; Chicago from 109,000 to 1,698,000.  The miles of city tenements began to rival, in the number of their residents, the farm homesteads of the West.  The time so dreaded by Jefferson had arrived.  People were “piled upon one another in great cities” and the republic of small farmers had passed away.

To these industrial centers flowed annually an ever-increasing tide of immigration, reaching the half million point in 1880; rising to three-quarters of a million three years later; and passing the million mark in a single year at the opening of the new century.  Immigration was as old as America but new elements now entered the situation.  In the first place, there were radical changes in the nationality of the newcomers.  The migration from Northern Europe—­England, Ireland, Germany, and Scandinavia—­diminished; that from Italy, Russia, and Austria-Hungary increased, more than three-fourths of the entire number coming from these three lands between the years 1900 and 1910.  These later immigrants were Italians, Poles, Magyars, Czechs, Slovaks, Russians, and Jews, who came from countries far removed from the language and the traditions of England whence came the founders of America.