kshops, and favouring the large factory at
their expense.

Sec. 5. Irresponsibility of Employers.--The third view of the sweating
System lays stress upon its moral aspect, and finds its chief cause in
the irresponsibility of the employer. Now we have already seen that this
severance of the personal relation between employer and employed is a
necessary result of the establishment of the large factory as the
industrial unit, and of the ever-growing complexity of modern commerce.
It is not merely that the widening gap of social position between
employer and employed, and the increased number of the latter, make the
previous close relation impossible. Quite as important is the fact that
the real employer in modern industry is growing more "impersonal." What
we mean is this. The nominal employer or manager is not the real
employer. The real employer of labour is capital, and it is to the
owners of the capital in any business that we must chiefly look for the
exercise of such responsibility as rightly subsists between employer and
employed. Now, while it is calculated that one-eighth of the business of
England is in the hands of joint-stock companies, constituting far more
than one-eighth of the large businesses, in the great majority of other
cases, where business is conducted on a large scale, the head of the
business is to a great extent a mere manager of other people's capital.
Thus while the manager's sense of personal responsibility is weakened by
the number of "hands" whom he employs, his freedom of action is likewise
crippled by his obligation to subserve the interests of a body of
capitalists who are in ignorance of the very names and number of the
human beings whose destiny they are controlling. The severance of the
real "employer" from his "hands" is thus far more complete than would
appear from mere attention to the growth in the size of the average
business. Now it must not be supposed that this severance of the
personal relation between employer and employed is of necessity a loss
to the latter. There is no reason to suppose that the close relation
subsisting in the old days between the master and his journeymen and
apprentices was as a rule idyllically beautiful. No doubt the control of
the master was often vexatious and despotic. The tyranny of a heartless
employer under the old system was probably much more injurious than the
apathy of the most vulgar plutocrat of to-day. The employe under the
modern system i