The economic theorists of the Manchester School regarded wages as necessarily governed by the working of the "iron law" of supply and demand. It was the "interest" of the employer to buy such labour as was required at as cheap a rate as possible. It was assumed that in this, as in other matters of "business," his procedure must be determined wholly by self-interest, to the exclusion of "sentimental" considerations. Individual employers might be better than their creed, and in the smaller "concerns" the relations between employer and employed were often humanized by personal knowledge and intercourse. With the advent of the joint-stock company this no longer held good. "A corporation has no bowels." Directors were not personally in contact with their workpeople, and their main consideration was for their shareholders. The whole tendency of the industrial order of society as it developed was in the direction of the exploitation of the workman in the interests of "capital." It was not that members of the employing class were consciously inhuman. It was simply that they were blinded to the human problems which were involved. They had become accustomed to regard as natural and inevitable a wage-slavery of the many to the few. Labour was a commodity in the market. The workman was a unit of labour. Regarded from the point of view of Capital he represented simply the potentiality of so many foot-pounds of more or less intelligently- directed energy _per diem_. His life as a human being, apart from the economic value of his labour, was from the "business" point of view irrelevant. The system was based upon a lie. "Treat human beings as machines as much as you will, the fact remains that they are incurably personal." The wage-slaves of the modern world asserted their personality, and the modern Socialist-Labour Movement is the result. The forces of organized labour have won some notable victories. They are a recognized power in the land. There are those who hope, and those who fear, that they will in the end become socially and politically omnipotent. It is now generally recognized that society prior to the war was on the brink of a struggle between the classes of great bitterness, and that the social condition of the country after the war is likely to be fraught with formidable possibilities. There are many observers who regard a social revolution, in one form or another, as inevitable.