pt business men) would have been the futile endeavor to
imprison defendants whom we are actually able to fine. He raises the
usual clamor, raised by all who object to the enforcement of the law,
that we are fining corporations instead of putting the heads of the
corporations in jail; and he states that this does not really harm the
chief offenders. Were this statement true, he himself would not be found
attacking us. The extraordinary violence of the assault upon our policy
contained in speeches like these, in the articles in the subsidized
press, in such huge advertisements and pamphlets as those above referred
to, and the enormous sums of money spent in these various ways, give a
fairly accurate measure of the anger and terror which our actions have
caused the corrupt men of vast wealth to feel in the very marrow of
their being.

The man thus attacking us is usually, like so many of his fellows,
either a great lawyer, or a paid editor who takes his commands from the
financiers and his arguments from their attorneys. If the former, he has
defended many malefactors, and he knows well that, thanks to the advice
of lawyers like himself, a certain kind of modern corporation has been
turned into an admirable instrument by which to render it well nigh
impossible to get at the really guilty man, so that in most cases the
only way of punishing the wrong is by fining the corporation or by
proceeding personally against some of the minor agents. These lawyers
and their employers are the men mainly responsible for this state of
things, and their responsibility is shared with the legislators who
ingeniously oppose the passing of just and effective laws, and with
those judges whose one aim seems to be to construe such laws so that
they cannot be executed. Nothing is sillier than this outcry on behalf
of the "innocent stockholders" in the corporations. We are besought to
pity the Standard Oil Company for a fine relatively far less great than
the fines every day inflicted in the police courts upon multitudes of
push cart peddlers and other petty offenders, whose woes never extort
one word from the men whose withers are wrung by the woes of the mighty.
The stockholders have the control of the corporation in their own hands.
The corporation officials are elected by those holding the majority of
the stock and can keep office only by having behind them the good-will
of these majority stockholders. They are not entitled to the slightest
pi