The Aberdeen weekly. [volume] (Aberdeen, Miss.) 1878-1933, 1908-01-31

legal fiction; it-is-a charter license
written in words upon parchment
or paper. A corporation has no
sense nor conscience, nor concious-
ness Of right or wrong doing 1t is
not a moral agent. When wrongs
are perpetrated in common parlance
by corporation, they are perpetra-
ted by individual men made up Of
flesh and blood, who use the name
and authority Of the corporation for
wrong doing, and the thing to be
punished always In government
resting upon individual sponsibili-
~ Is the flesh and blood individual
who abuses the name and the cor
porate authority To perpetual So
called corporate wrong.
Hence you punish me, a Demo
crat, because certain Republicans,
who happened To be IN control of
the treasury Of the company, took
my money to help the campaign
committee
If on the other hand the corpor-
alton is strong enough it can shift
the burden from Is treasurer, and
then who viii you punish How
viii the shifting take place They
will either raise the price of the ar
ticle which they control to the con-
sumner and you viii pay it, or they
viii lower the wages which they pay
to the lab0rer, and thus the labor
ing man will pay the fine.
Then let US consider the folly Of
enjoining corporations. In the first
place an injunction does little good.
The Northern Securities Company
was enjoined, yet Mr. Hill Is doing
business under an agents agree
ment, just as they did before the
Injunction. The Standard Oil Com
pany was fined, but they control
the oil interests of the country, and
in consequence the government un-
dertook to punish them in a differ
ent way by filming them. And what
does not injunction do? 1t tenn
p0rarily stops business. What bust
ness? The business of production
the business Of transportation
the business of exchange. You have
therefore punished civilization and
progress. What you want to do is
to stop the carrying on Of business
contrary to law, and the only way
to do it is to make the man who has
violated the law feel punishment in
the flesh, and until that is done you
will not DO it. And the President
has an idea he is going to stop it
all with his new-fangled idea of
throwing them all in the receiver ;
hands. That is an infinite stoppage
Of business. You don't want to put
a stop to the oil business or the steel
production of the country, you do
want to put an end to the carrying
on of business contrary to the
statutes.
Then, my friends, the latest dis
c0very Of the present incumbent of
the White House Is that we can put
an end to all this by Federal char
ter incorporation Of companies en-
gaging in interstate commerce.
What have you done2 You have
simply changed the form of trying
the offender, from a State Court to
a Federal court, and that is all Is
there any more reason to believe
man viii more certainly meet with
punishment in the Federal court
than he viii in a State court?
In individual punishment for
wrong doing and government guar
antee of equality for individual right
doing, you have no mysteries, but
the same old, everlasting principles
in accordance with which civiliza-
ton has progressed since the world
began, and you have accom- plished
your purpose.
After all, what man is lying in
Jail today because OF violation of
trust laws Of the United States2 II
any there be, | am not acquainted
with his name or habitation The
most secure of all governments IS
the government which you exercise
over yourselves, and the next most
secure is that of the locality, wheth-
er it be town in the East or a
county in Mississippi; and the next
one that of your State; and the last
that of the Federal government.
As I said at Vicksburg, there
was a sense in which the govern
meat Of the United States is not
government Of the United Statas at
all, but it is a piece Of political ma
chinery contrived for the purpose of
protecting the several governments
Of the several United States from
internal discord, aggression by one
Of them upon the other, or by for
eign aggression. The Federal gov
eminent was formed for that pur-
pose, and the nearer we can bring
it back to what it was intended to
be, the better for US, and the less
we deceive ourselves with the idea
that the Federal government can by
legislation furnish a panacea for the
ills Of life, the best for US.
4 am glad that something Of a
day of reckoning has come to the
Republican party which has been
advocating the doctrine Of late that
the legislation depends upon the
people. They said that the full dim
ner pail was due to the fact that
the Republican party was in power.
What are they going to say now? If
the government at Washington was
the cause of our prosperity, then
how can you deny that the govern