and improper regulation of business-all fought against the adoption of a
sane, effective, and far-reaching policy.

It is a vitally necessary thing to have the persons in control of big
trusts of the character of the Standard Oil Trust and Tobacco Trust
taught that they are under the law, just as it was a necessary thing to
have the Sugar Trust taught the same lesson in drastic fashion by Mr.
Henry L. Stimson when he was United States District Attorney in the
city of New York. But to attempt to meet the whole problem not by
administrative governmental action but by a succession of lawsuits is
hopeless from the standpoint of working out a permanently satisfactory
solution. Moreover, the results sought to be achieved are achieved only
in extremely insufficient and fragmentary measure by breaking up all big
corporations, whether they have behaved well or ill, into a number of
little corporations which it is perfectly certain will be largely, and
perhaps altogether, under the same control. Such action is harsh and
mischievous if the corporation is guilty of nothing except its size; and
where, as in the case of the Standard Oil, and especially the Tobacco,
trusts, the corporation has been guilty of immoral and anti-social
practices, there is need for far more drastic and thoroughgoing action
than any that has been taken, under the recent decree of the Supreme
Court. In the case of the Tobacco Trust, for instance, the settlement in
the Circuit Court, in which the representatives of the Government
seem inclined to concur, practically leaves all of the companies still
substantially under the control of the twenty-nine original defendants.
Such a result is lamentable from the standpoint of justice. The decision
of the Circuit Court, if allowed to stand, means that the Tobacco Trust
has merely been obliged to change its clothes, that none of the real
offenders have received any real punishment, while, as the New York
Times, a pro-trust paper, says, the tobacco concerns, in their new
clothes, are in positions of "ease and luxury," and "immune from
prosecution under the law."

Surely, miscarriage of justice is not too strong a term to apply to such
a result when considered in connection with what the Supreme Court said
of this Trust. That great Court in its decision used language which,
in spite of its habitual and severe self-restraint in stigmatizing
wrong-doing, yet unhesitatingly condemns the Tobacco Trust for moral
turpitude,