vidually helpless. To be certain that he and his family may
continue to live he must seek the power of combination with others, and in
the end he inevitably calls upon that great combination of all citizens
which we call government to do something more than merely keep the
peace--to regulate the machinery of production and distribution and
safeguard it from interference so that it shall continue to work.

A similar change has taken place in the conditions under which a great part
of our people engage in the industries by which they get their living.
Under comparatively simple industrial conditions the relation between
employer and employee was mainly a relation of individual to individual,
with individual freedom of contract and freedom of opportunity essential to
equality in the commerce of life. Now, in the great manufacturing, mining,
and transportation industries of the country, instead of the free give
and take of individual contract there is substituted a vast system of
collective bargaining between great masses of men organized and acting
through their representatives, or the individual on the one side accepts
what he can get from superior power on the other. In the movement of these
mighty forces of organization the individual laborer, the individual
stockholder, the individual consumer, is helpless.

There has been another change of conditions through the development of
political organization. The theory of political activity which had its
origin approximately in the administration of President Jackson, and which
is characterized by Marcy's declaration that "to the victors belong
the spoils," tended to make the possession of office the primary and
all-absorbing purpose of political conflict. A complicated system of party
organization and representation grew up under which a disciplined body of
party workers in each state supported each other, controlled the machinery
of nomination, and thus controlled nominations. The members of state
legislatures and other officers, when elected, felt a more acute
responsibility to the organization which could control their renomination
than to the electors, and therefore became accustomed to shape their
conduct according to the wishes of the nominating organization. Accordingly
the real power of government came to be vested to a high degree in these
unofficial political organizations, and where there was a strong man at
the head of an organization his control came to be someth