The workingman is disposed to believe in the light of such figures that the large wealth accumulated by his employer represents over and above a fair profit the increased wages out of which he naturally regards himself as being mulcted.  He may be thick-headed, but he can see that in such a see-saw of profits versus wages the superior power of capital has the odds all in its favor.  He learns to regard the whole state of the industrial world as one in which might makes right, and feebleness is the synonym of fault.

How, in the name of all that is reasonable, can the average man take much interest in his employer or identity himself with that employer under such a state of things as the economy sanctioned by the employer has taught him?  This is aggravated by the whole character of our modern industrial system.

The factory system is a new feudalism, in which a master rarely deals directly with his hands.  Superintendents, managers, and “bosses” stand between him and them.  He does not know them; they do not know him.  The old common feeling is disappearing.  And—­this is a significant point that it behooves workingmen to notice—­the intermediaries are generally workingmen who have risen out of the ranks of manual labor and have lost all fellow-feeling with their old comrades, without gaining the larger sympathy with humanity which often comes from better culture.  The hardest men upon workingmen are ex-workingmen.  It is stated, on what seems to be good authority, that the general superintendent of the great corporation which lately has shown so hard a feeling towards its operatives when on a strike was himself only ten years ago a telegraph-operator.

A further aggravating feature of this problem is the increasing tendency of capital to associated action.  What little knowledge of his employees or sympathy with them the individual manufacturer might have is wholly lost in the case of the corporation.  To the stockholders of a great joint-stock company, many of whom are never on the spot, the hundreds of laborers employed by the company are simply “hands”—­as to whose possession of hearts or minds or souls the by-laws rarely take cognizance.  Here there is plainly a case where capital—­the party of brains and wealth—­the head of the industrial association, should lead off in a systematic effort and renew, as far as may be, the old human tie, for which no substitute has ever been devised.

To conciliate the interests of the classes, and identify labor with capital, individual employers must re-establish personal relationships between themselves and their men.  What might be done in this way, and how, this being done, the present alienation of feeling on the part of our working-men would largely disappear, must be evident to any one