How can anything else be fairly expected in our present state of things from the _average_ workingman under the _average_ employer?
I emphasize the "average" because there are employees of exceptional intelligence and honor, as there are employers of exceptional conscientiousness, anxious to do fairly by their men.

The received political economy has taught the average workingman that the relations of capital and labor are those of hostile interests; that profits and wages are in an inverse ratio; that the symbol of the factory is a see-saw, on which capital goes up as labor goes down.

As things are, there is unfortunately too much ground for this notion, as the workman sees.
Mr.Carroll D.Wright, in the fourteenth annual report of the Massachusetts Bureau of Labor (1883), shows that in 1875 the percentage of wages paid to the value of production, in over 2,000 establishments, was 24.68; and that in 1880 it was 20.23.This means that the workingmen's share of the returns of their own labor, so far from increasing, has decreased one sixth in five years.
The workingman is disposed to believe in the light of such figures that the large wealth accumulated by his employer represents over and above a fair profit the increased wages out of which he naturally regards himself as being mulcted.
He may be thick-headed, but he can see that in such a see-saw of profits _versus_ wages the superior power of capital has the odds all in its favor.

He learns to regard the whole state of the industrial world as one in which _might_ makes _right_, and feebleness is the synonym of fault.
How, in the name of all that is reasonable, can the average man take much interest in his employer or identity himself with that employer under such a state of things as the economy sanctioned by the employer has taught him?
This is aggravated by the whole character of our modern industrial system.
The factory system is a new feudalism, in which a master rarely deals directly with his hands.

Superintendents, managers, and "bosses" stand between him and them.