What little knowledge of his employees or sympathy with them the individual manufacturer might have is wholly lost in the case of the corporation.

To the stockholders of a great joint-stock company, many of whom are never on the spot, the hundreds of laborers employed by the company are simply "hands"-- as to whose possession of hearts or minds or souls the by-laws rarely take cognizance.

Here there is plainly a case where capital--the party of brains and wealth--the head of the industrial association, should lead off in a systematic effort and renew, as far as may be, the old human tie, for which no substitute has ever been devised.
To conciliate the interests of the classes, and identify labor with capital, individual employers must re-establish personal relationships between themselves and their men.
What might be done in this way, and how, this being done, the present alienation of feeling on the part of our working-men would largely disappear, must be evident to any one who has watched some of the beautiful exemplifications of this relationship which have already grown into being on our shores.

I know of one large manufacturer, in a city not a hundred miles from this, who started to enter the ministry as a young man, but found to his intense disappointment that he had no aptitude for the work of a preacher, and turned his attention, on the insistent advice of those nearest to him, to active business.

He took up the business which his father had left him at his death and had left largely involved.