The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 21: The Recent Days (1910-1914)
History
The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 21: The Recent Days (1910-1914)
World history
It is true that, while most men are thus submerged in the corporation,
a few, a very few, are exalted to power which as individuals they could
never have wielded. Through the great organizations of which they are
the heads, a few are enabled to play a part unprecedented by anything
in history in the control of the business operations of the country and
in the determination of the happiness of great numbers of people.
Yesterday, and ever since history began, men were related to one
another as individuals. To be sure there were the family, the Church,
and the State, institutions which associated men in certain limited
circles of relationships. But in the ordinary concerns of life, in the
ordinary work, in the daily round, men dealt freely and directly with
one another. To-day, the everyday relationships of men are largely with
great impersonal concerns, with organizations, not with other
individual men.
Now this is nothing short of a new social age, a new era of human
relationships, a new stage-setting for the drama of life.
In this new age we find, for instance, that our laws with regard to the
relations of employer and employee are in many respects wholly
antiquated and impossible. They were framed for another age, which
nobody now living remembers, which is, indeed, so remote from our life
that it would be difficult for many of us to understand it if it were
described to us. The employer is now generally a corporation or a huge
company of some kind; the employee is one of hundreds or of thousands
brought together, not by individual masters whom they know and with
whom they have personal relations, but by agents of one sort or
another. Working men are marshaled in great numbers for the performance
of a multitude of particular tasks under a common discipline. They
generally use dangerous and powerful machinery, over whose repair and
renewal they have no control. New rules must be devised with regard to
their obligations and their rights, their obligations to their
employers and their responsibilities to one another. New rules must be
devised for their protection, for their compensation when injured, for
their support when disabled.
There is something very new and very big and very complex about these
new relations of capital and labor. A new economic society has sprung
up, and we must effect a new set of adjustments. We must not pit power
against weakness. The employer is generally, in our day, as I have
said, not an individual, but a powerful group; and yet the working man
when dealing with his employer is still, under our existing law, an
individual.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
Reviews
Reviews
No reviews yet
Be the first to share your thoughts on this work.
Elsewhere in the archive
Join the Discussion
Join the discussion
Sign in to leave a comment or review.
Sign InorCreate an account