Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 1.djvu/46

 34 One form of this is the tyranny of aggregated wealth. It is too late a day in the history of modern society to deplore the union of capital in masses for the accomplishment of ends which can only be attained by vast financial power. The achievements of today consist in the application of tremendous controlled energies in the overcoming of gigantic obstacles. We transport our merchandise not in single wagons loaded with hundred-weight and hauled by creeping oxen, but in long trains crammed with hundreds of tons and whirled through space by powerful steam engines. We build bridges not over rivulets but over arms of the sea—measuring their length not in rods but miles. And in all the infinity of great undertakings which engage the restless activities of our leaders of industry, capital is demanded, not in thousands, but in millions—not in millions, but in hundreds of millions. How else could we cleave the continent with the Nicaragua canal or span it with the steel rails of our Pacific highways? The nineteenth century is not the eighteenth. Today is not yesterday. Capital must be massed in order to work out the plain and necessary tasks which with their gigantic difficulties confront us with our gigantic powers.

But in wielding great resources for the attainment of grand results, the individual has withered. The rights and interests of a single puny human unit, if in the way, are crushed as if by a car of Juggernaut. The general of an army thinks of his men as so many machines. That they have nerves, hopes, longings, affections, of all this he takes no thought. So many men he allows to be destroyed in exchange for a battery. So many more he gladly sacrifices for a strategic point. That is war. And so in the business of our great corporations. The employés are too apt to be held as mere cogs or pinions in the machinery. If men could be fabricated of brass and leather, to be set going by changing a power belt, to be stopped by touching a lever, our corporations would gladly discard flesh and blood. But as the human brain and the human hand must be employed, they are handled as nearly as possible as though in fact they were of brass