Why is it that we have a labor question at all?  It is for the simple and very sufficient reason that the laboring man and the employer are not intimate associates now as they used to be in time past.  Most of our laws were formed in the age when employer and employees knew each other, knew each other’s characters, were associates with each other, dealt with each other as man with man.  That is no longer the case.  You not only do not come into personal contact with the men who have the supreme command in those corporations, but it would be out of the question for you to do it.  Our modern corporations employ thousands, and in some instances hundreds of thousands, of men.  The only persons whom you see or deal with are local superintendents or local representatives of a vast organization, which is not like anything that the workingmen of the time in which our laws were framed knew anything about.  A little group of workingmen, seeing their employer every day, dealing with him in a personal way, is one thing, and the modern body of labor engaged as employees of the huge enterprises that spread all over the country, dealing with men of whom they can form no personal conception, is another thing.  A very different thing.  You never saw a corporation, any more than you ever saw a government.  Many a workingman to-day never saw the body of men who are conducting the industry in which he is employed.  And they never saw him.  What they know about him is written in ledgers and books and letters, in the correspondence of the office, in the reports of the superintendents.  He is a long way off from them.

So what we have to discuss is, not wrongs which individuals intentionally do,—­I do not believe there are a great many of those,—­but the wrongs of a system.  I want to record my protest against any discussion of this matter which would seem to indicate that there are bodies of our fellow-citizens who are trying to grind us down and do us injustice.  There are some men of that sort.  I don’t know how they sleep o’ nights, but there are men of that kind.  Thank God, they are not numerous.  The truth is, we are all caught in a great economic system which is heartless.  The modern corporation is not engaged in business as an individual.  When we deal with it, we deal with an impersonal element, an immaterial piece of society.  A modern corporation is a means of co-operation in the conduct of an enterprise which is so big that no one man can conduct it, and which the resources of no one man are sufficient to finance.  A company is formed; that company puts out a prospectus; the promoters expect to raise a certain fund as capital stock.  Well, how are they going to raise it?  They are going to raise it from the public in general, some of whom will buy their stock.  The moment that begins, there is formed—­what?  A joint stock corporation.  Men begin to pool their earnings, little piles, big piles.  A certain number of men are elected by the stockholders to be directors, and these directors elect a president.  This president is the head of the undertaking, and the directors are its managers.