The Lafayette advertiser. [volume] (Vermilionville [i.e. Lafayette], La.) 1865-19??, 1909-06-18

pany with millions of capital and sure
of handsome legitimate profits, was
worked along dishonest and desperate
lines. Most Of us are accustomed to
think that lack of cash is the supreme
temptation to crime-that the vast
majority of men and m sell their
honor at the call of IN overmastering
need. But here we have an example
to prove that, as the Good Book says,
"the thing which is crooked cannot be
made straight" In trade-as in poll
tics and, alas, even in religion some
times-ambition and greed eface the
boundaries of divine and human law,
til the end IS thought to Justify the
means. In such a career it is impOssi-
BILE to stop short at the first offense.
As Macbeth was drawn irresistably on
from murder to murder, so fraud,
speculation and graft swiftly harden
into habit.
A peculiar phase of the American
Sugar Refining Company's misdeeds
is that the government and the rival
refinery were not cheated for the
benefit of the cheats alone; for the
Illicit gains must have gone to swell
the minority shareholders dividends,
| unless the trusts books were doctor
| ed, as it's scales admittedly were.
On the former theory, we have to deal
with a new species of altruism; on the
latter hypothesis, We are confronted
with a rottenness SO ~farreaching and
thorough as to stagger belief. But,
from either point of view, investors
have to reckon with a captain of in
dustry of somewhat novel type. In
the heyday of rebates and preferen-
tial tariffs, the autocrats went
quite so far as Mr.. Havemeyer and
his colleagues are now known to have
gone. This is not to say that the au-
tocrats of the railway world had less
skill, or more conscience, but only
that the accounts of the railways were
subject to official scrutiny. whereas
the trusts were thought to be purely
private affairs. Under the old regime.
for instance, the American Sugar Re-
filming Company was run as a blind
pool, over which no government COM
mission had the slightest control. The
result of the freedom from criticism
might have been foretold. No man,
or set of men, is wise and good enough
to WELD absolute power. The benev-
client despot is a dream.
Happily, we live in an era when the
temptations of money-getting are bet
ter understood and when the glamor
of gold, irrespective of its source and
it's use, is no longer what it was. We
do not now attribute genius to a null
timillionaire, as we used to do: for it
is s~elf-evident that IN intellectual pig
my could manipulate scales, or fill his
pockets at the expense of the railway
whose rates he was PRIVILEGED to fix.
Then, too, one must not forget that
dishonest methods become more per-
ilous. as the years pass. Uncle Sam
has shown that there is no resisting
his probe. The government does not
die, nor does its arm tire. As Greene
and Gaynor were hailed home from a
foreign land and convicted at enorm-
GUS cost, so the INSCRIPTIONS mana
gers Of corporations find that the
game Is not worth the candle. After
a while, the plan pursued by United
States Steel will be universally accept
ed. Nor will legal liability be the
sole incentive to rectitude. Even now,
social o~stracism begins to be the lot
Of the trickster and the thief in high
finance. Courts and juries can do no
wonders in staying the march Of the
moral plague, but the thorough and
abiding reform must spring from the
heart Of the nation itself.