TENDENCIES OF INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION 683 



citizenship. That is, the irresistible ground-swell and tidal movement 

 of the present quarter-century has been away from individualism 

 toward a new solidarity. While the individual instead of the kin- 

 dred group is its primary constituent unit, yet, as has been none 

 too strikingly said, we are " struggling with this preposterous initial 

 tact of the individual, the only possible social unit and no longer 

 a thinkable possibility, the only real presence and never present." 

 But the synthesis of these elusive factors of the social problem, never 

 more contradictory than now, was seen to be fundamentally inher- 

 ent in human nature in the vision of a poet, who long antedated 

 our era, and sang of it thus: 



" Man is all symmetry, full of proportions, 

 One limb with another, 

 And all to all the world beside. 

 Each part may call the farthest brother, 

 For head with foot hath private amity 

 And both with moons and tides." 



These tendencies of the times have dominated more and more 

 those of the groups of individuals and interests under review in this 

 department, with the outline sketch of whose trend I am charged. 



They have been most determinative, of course, in the industrial 

 group. The freedom of contract, conceded to be the inalienable 

 right of the individual, is no longer protected or effectively guar- 

 anteed by the law alone. Combination on either side controls 

 the market and leaves the unorganized individual to accept what is 

 offered with no alternative. To bargain freely with combined 

 capital, the individual laborer has found it an economic necessity 

 to organize his craft, even at the expense of abridging his personal 

 liberty. The collective trade agreement, on one or both sides, is 

 inevitably superseding the individual contract in the labor market. 

 The form of organization developed by labor to meet this require- 

 ment left the individual employer or corporation as helplessly at 

 the dictation of the united employees as ever the laborer has found 

 himself at the mercy of his employer in dealing single-handed and 

 alone with organized capital. Employers' associations became as 

 much of an economic necessity as labor-unions. Both are organized 

 on essentially the same basis of an instinctive class-conscious impulse 

 for self-preservation. Each obliges the other to conform the type 

 and tactics of its organization to virtually the same model. Swiftly 

 and inevitably both constituents in the industrial group are adjust- 

 ing their business methods and relationships to these inexorable 

 conditions of modern industry. 



Beneath all the overlying turmoil and friction, injustice and 

 menace, attending this rapid and radical readjustment, there is to be 

 clearly discerned the evolution of a larger liberty, at least for the 



