Page:Can a man be a Christian on a pound a week? - Hardie.djvu/18

 from us, you must pay the price we ask or go without. That, as a rule, is a very desirable state of things for those who have shares in the trust. But what about the consumer? Unprotected by the free play of competition in the open markets, he is at the mercy of a concern over which he has no control, and the one object of which is to make dividends, for which, in the very nature of things, the demand must be an ever-increasing one. Clearly such a state of things must be bid for the consumer. And what of the workman? The employer who manages his own business is brought into direct and personal relations with his workpeople, with whom he is compelled to maintain more or less of a human relationship. But that is out of the question under the trust. The “employer” here is a corporate body composed of hundreds of people of whose very names the workman is ignorant. There is a general manager or superintendent, and under him, in descending degrees, a small army of officials, until finally the foreman is reached, who has charge of some small squad. But the foreman has nothing to do in these large establishments with either wages or conditions of employment. His business is to see that the men under him do the work properly for which they are being paid. He is simply a “driver” who is sometimes paid by results. And so the whole concern is run as if it were apiece of machinery, of which the workmen were the cogs in the wheel. Everything savouring of a human relationship is destroyed. The machine must be kept going to grind out dividends, even if every generous impulse and kindly aspiration be crushed to nothingness.

Socialism. It is not enough to say that the trust is coming; the trust has come. And it