Great financial corporations, doing a nation-wide and even a world-wide business, had taken the place of the smaller concerns of an earlier time.

The old familiar, intimate relations between employer and employee were passing.

A few generations before, the boss had known every man in his shop; he called his men Bill, Tom, Dick, John; he inquired after their wives and babies; he swapped jokes and stories and perhaps a bit of tobacco with them.

In the small establishment there had been a friendly human relationship between employer and employee.
There was no such relation between the great railway magnates, who controlled the anthracite industry, and the one hundred and fifty thousand men who worked in their mines, or the half million women and children who were dependent upon these miners for their daily bread.
Very few of these mine workers had ever seen, for instance, the president of the Reading Railroad.

Had they seen him many of them could not have spoken to him, for tens of thousands of the mine workers were recent immigrants who did not understand the language which he spoke and who spoke a language which he could not understand.
Again, a few generations ago an American workman could have saved money, gone West and taken up a homestead.