was imperative that the law relative to these abuses
should be enforced. On this point Roosevelt's own words are significant:
"Although under the decision of the courts the National Government had
power over the railways, I found, when I became President, that
this power was either not exercised at all or exercised with utter
inefficiency. The law against rebates was a dead letter. All the
unscrupulous railway men had been allowed to violate it with impunity;
and because of this, as was inevitable, the scrupulous and decent
railway men had been forced to violate it themselves, under penalty of
being beaten by their less scrupulous rivals. It was not the fault of
these decent railway men. It was the fault of the Government."

Roosevelt did not propose that this condition should continue to be the
fault of the Government while he was at its head, and he inaugurated a
vigorous campaign against railways that had given rebates and against
corporations that had accepted--or extorted-them. The campaign reached a
spectacular peak in a prosecution of the Standard Oil Company, in which
fines aggregating over $29,000,000 were imposed by Judge Kenesaw M.
Landis of the United States District Court at Chicago for the offense
of accepting rebates. The Circuit Court of Appeals ultimately determined
that the fine was improperly large, since it had been based on
the untenable theory that each shipment on which a rebate was paid
constituted a separate offense. At the second trial the presiding
judge ordered an acquittal. In spite, however, of the failure of this
particular case, with its spectacular features, the net result of the
rebate prosecutions was that the rebate evil was eliminated for good and
all from American railway and commercial life.

When Roosevelt demanded the "square deal" between business and the
people, he meant precisely what he said. He had no intention of
permitting justice to be required from the great corporations without
insisting that justice be done to them in turn. The most interesting
case in point was that of the Tennessee Coal and Iron Company. To this
day the action which Roosevelt took in the matter is looked upon, by
many of those extremists who can see nothing good in "big business," as
a proof of his undue sympathy with the capitalist. But thirteen years
later the United States Supreme Court in deciding the case against the
United States Steel Corporation in favor of the Corporation, added an
obiter