The daily morning journal and courier., 1902-08-26

reluctant to attempt that for some time in the first decades of the nineteenth century.
 Now. when this government was founded there were no great individual or corporate fortunes, and commerce and industry were being carried on very much as they had been from the days when Nineyeh and Babylon stood in the Mesopotamian Valley. The wagon train and the pack train and the sailing eraft-those were the methods of com merce. Everything has been rev0lu- tiOniZed in the business world ever since and the progress of civilization from being trickle has become a torrent. There was no particular thing at that time to bother as to whether the nation or the state had control of the corpora tions. They were easy to control. Now. however. the exact reverse is the case. and remember I say corporations" do not merely say trusts-merelyNc com binations of corporations. or corpora tions under certain peculiar conditions. For instance. some time ago the attor- ney-general took action against a cer- tain trust. There has been considerable discussion as to whether the trust aim ed at would not seek to get out from under the law by becoming a single cor poration.
 Now. want laws to enable us to deal with 1t, no matter what shape it takes, Loud applause.) I want to see the government able to get at it definitely so that the action of the government cannot ha ava5ad b,, oor +r,riyi0o with in or without federal or state statutes. At present we have really no efficient influence over big corporation which does business fin more than one state. Frequently the corporation has nothing whatever to do with the state in which it is incorporated except to get incor- porated, and its actions may be taken in entirely different communities communities which may object very much to the methods of incorporation in the state named. I don't think you can get action by any state-acting by all the states-that will give us satis- factory control of the trusts or big cor porations, and the result is at present that we have a great, powerful, artifl- cial creation which has no creator to which it is responsible. (Applause.) The creator creates it and then it goes and operates somewhere else, and there | is no interest to the creator to deal with | 1t. It does not do anything in that state. It does not do anything where the creator has power-it operates out | side entirely. Of course, it is a mere | truism that the corporation is the crea- | ture of the state; that the state is sov- ereign.
 l Now. want to make a real and not a nominal sovereign; to have some one sovereign to which the corporation shall be really and not nominally responsible. At present if we pass laws nobody can tell whether they will amount to any, thing. Now, that has two bad effects. | In the first place, the corporation be- | comes indifferent to the law-making body, and in the next place, gentlemen, the law-making body gets Into that most pernicious custom of passing l law, not with reference to what will be done under it, but with reference to its | effects on the opinions of the voters, | Now, that is bad thing. When any body of lawmakers passes a law not
 
 law will do good or ill, but with the knowledge that not much will come of it, and yet that perhaps the people as whole will likely think was good on the statute books, it does not speak we'll for the lawmakers, and 1t does not speak very we'll for the people eith- CT. Now, what I hope to see is power | given to the national legislature which | shall make the control real. It would be an excellent thing if we could have all the states act on somewhat similar lines so that it would be unnecessary for the national government to act, but all of you know perfectly well that the states won't act on somewhat similar lines. Nothing has been done in the direction of intelligent dealing by the states as a collective body with these great corporations. Here in Massachu- setts you have what I regard as, on the whole, excellent corporation laws. think that most of our difficulties-here again remember I am not promising the millennium; it is not in my power to promise it-would be a far way of solution if we had the power to put on the national statute books. and did put on them. laws for the nation much like those you have here on the subject of corporations in Massachusetts. (Ap- plause.)
 So you see. gentlemen, am not advo- eating anything very revolutionary. | Laughter). I am advocating action to prevent anything revolutionary. Loud applause). Now if we can get adequate control by the nation of these corpora tions then we can pass legislation which will give us the power of regulation and supervision over them. If the nation had that power, mind you, should ad- vocate as strenuorsly as I knew how that the power should be exercised with extreme caution and self-restraint. No good will come from plunging in with out having looked carefully ahead. The first thing we want is the publicity and I don't mean publicity as a favor by some corporations. I mean it as right from all corporations affected by the law. I want publicity as to the essen- tjal facts in which the public has an l interest. l want the knowledge given to the accredited representatives of the people of facts on which those represen- tatives can if they see fit, base their actions later. The publicity itself would cure many evils. The light of day is great deterrent to wrong doing. If the mere fact of being able to put out nakedly statements which would lc1n f11.o of l.,