II
With the decline of the petty trades, the growth of the combinations, and the concentration in fewer hands of the machinery of production, the subordination of the wage-earner becomes more certain and more fixed. If ever he were a free agent,—in the sense and to the degree that any one in human society can be free,—the day is passed. Through agencies constantly augmenting and extending, he is “cabin’d, cribb’d, confin’d, bound in,” to a narrowing circle of possible efforts. Divorced from the land and from the tools of production, he can live only by accepting such wages and conditions as are offered him; and the terms are always such that the kernel of his product goes to some other man, while the husks and the tares remain his own portion. The patronizing orators of Labor Day and of campaign times sometimes delight to symbolize him as a sturdy Gulliver, though it needs little reflection to see that it is the Gulliver of Brobdingnag, and not that of Lilliput, that more correctly figures his present status. The mass of current tendencies tends to fix him as a dependent—a unit of a lower order in a series of gradations running up to the Big Men. “The corporation,” writes Mr. Richmond,[4] “holds of the State, and its officers hold of the corporation, and their retainers, managers, and servants all hold the tenure of their employment from their superiors in office, from the highest to the lowest.” But whether corporation, or partnership, or individual, employs the laborer’s services, his status is practically the same. Trade-unions and other labor societies tend to modify that dependence; and occasionally social legislation, when it runs the fierce gantlet of the courts, exerts a further modification. But it is coming to be recognized that there is a limit, perhaps now nearly attained, beyond which the labor societies can exert no influence; and as for social legislation, as will be shown farther along, it has certainly reached its culmination.
To the natural causes making for the laborer’s subordination have been added in recent years certain conscious and deliberate forces. There is a collective pressure brought to bear upon his wages; there is a collective antagonism maintained against his unions; there is a growing movement in the direction of holding him for the term of his profitable service to the company or corporation by which he is employed, and there is a judicial tendency to pretend still to regard him, despite his changing status, as an economically free agent, able to do what he wills, and to protect himself from all injustice.