need not be over-tender about sparing the dishonest."[296:1]

One of the chief difficulties in the practical application of his
policies has been that the Government cannot have the power to punish
dishonest corporations without first being entrusted with a measure of
control over all corporate operations, the concession of which control
the honest corporations have felt compelled to resist. Nor is it
possible to say that their resistance has not been justified. However
wisely and forbearingly Mr. Roosevelt himself might use whatever power
was placed in his hands, there has been little in the experience of the
corporations in America to make them believe that they can trust either
office-holders in general or, for any long term, the Government itself.
Dispassionate students of the railway problem in the United States are
aware that there is nothing which the corporations have done to the
injury of the public worse than the wanton and gratuitous injuries which
have been done by the politicians, by the State governments, and even on
occasions by the Federal Government itself, to the corporations. If
particular railway companies have at times abused the power of which
they were possessed as monopolising the transportation to and from a
certain section of the country, that abuse has not excelled in
wantonness and immorality the abuses of their power over the
corporations of which several of the Western States have been
systematically guilty. There has been little encouragement to the
corporations to submit themselves to any larger measure of public
control than has been necessary; and the lessons of the past have shown
that it would be injudicious for the railways to surrender
uncomplainingly to the State governments authority which the British
companies can leave to the Board of Trade without misgiving. And there
was a time when the national Interstate Commerce Commission was, if more
honest, not much less prejudiced in its dealing with the corporations
subject to its authority than were the governments or railway
commissions of the individual States.

Mr. Roosevelt's desire may have been (as it is) only to protect the
people against the misuse of their power by dishonest corporations; and
the honest corporations would be no less glad than Mr. Roosevelt himself
to see the dishonest brought to book. But in the necessity of resisting
(or what has seemed to the corporations the necessity of resisting) the
extensions of the