The new freedom : $b a call for the emancipation of the generous energies of a peopleWilson, Woodrow
History
The new freedom : $b a call for the emancipation of the generous energies of a people
Wilson, Woodrow
United States -- Politics and government -- 1913-1921; United States -- Social conditions -- 1865-1918
You know what happens when you are the servant of a corporation. You have
in no instance access to the men who are really determining the policy of
the corporation. If the corporation is doing the things that it ought not
to do, you really have no voice in the matter and must obey the orders,
and you have oftentimes with deep mortification to co-operate in the doing
of things which you know are against the public interest. Your
individuality is swallowed up in the individuality and purpose of a great
organization.
It is true that, while most men are thus submerged in the corporation, a
few, a very few, are exalted to a 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 wide circles of
relationship. 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. Workingmen 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.
Rules must be devised for their protection, for their compensation when
injured, for their support when disabled.
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