ITEMS OF INTEREST September 10, 1910 Issue

ITEMS OF INTEREST

Ex-President Roosevelt, on his speaking tour through the West, has declared himself in favor of these doctrines: Elimination of special interests from politics; complete and effective publicity of corporation affairs; passage of laws prohibiting the use of corporate funds directly or indirectly for political purposes; government supervision of the capitalization not only of public service corporations, but of all corporations, but of all corporations doing an interstate business; personal responsibility of officers and directors of corporations that break the law; increased power of the federal bureau of corporations and the interstate commerce commission to control industry more effectively; revision of the tariff, one schedule at a time, on the basis of information furnished by an expert tariff commission; graduated income tax and graduated inheritance tax; readjustment of the country's financial system in such a way as to prevent repetition of periodical financial panics; maintenance of an efficient army and a navy large enough to insure the respect of other nations as a guarantee of peace; use of national resources for the benefit of all the people; extension of the work of the departments of agriculture, of the national and state governments, and of agricultural colleges and experiment stations, so as to take in all phases of life on the farm; regulation of the terms and conditions of labor, by means of comprehensive workmen's compensation acts, state and national laws to regulate child labor and the work of women, enforcement of better sanitation conditions for workers, and extension of the use of safety appliances in industry and commerce, both in and between the states; clear division of authority between the national and the various state governments; direct primaries, associated with corrupt practices acts; publicity of campaign contributions not only after, but before election; prompt removal of unfaithful and incompetent public servants; provisions against the performance of any service for interstate corporations or the reception of any compensation from such corporations by national officers.

President Woodrow Wilson of Princeton University, addressing the American Bar Association at its annual convention, said: "Constitutional lawyers have fallen into the background. We have relegated them to the supreme court, without asking ourselves where we are to find them when vacancies occur in that great tribunal. A new type of lawyer has been created; and that new type has come to be the prevailing type. In gaining new functions. in becoming identified with particular interests, the lawyer has lost his old unction, is looked askance at in politics, and must disavow special engagements if he would have his counsel heeded in matters of common concern. Corporations do not do wrong. Individuals do wrong, the individuals who direct and use them for selfish and illegitimate purposes, to the injury of society and the serious curtailment of private rights. You cannot punish corporations. Fines fall upon the wrong persons—upon the stockholders and the customers rather than upon the men who direct the policy of the business. Many modern corporations wield revenues and command resources which no ancient state possessed and which some modern bodies politic show no approach to in their budgets. And these huge industrial organizations we continue to treat as legal persons, as individuals. We can have corporations, can retain them in unimpaired efficiency, without depriving law of its ancient searching efficacy, its inexorable mandate that men, not societies, must suffer for wrongs done. You will say that in many instances it is not fair to pick out for punishment the particular officer who ordered a thing done, because he really had no freedom in the matter; that he is himself under orders, is a dummy manipulated from without. I reply that society should permit no man to carry out orders which are against the law and public policy, and that, if you will but put one or two conspicuous dummies in the penitentiary, there will be no more dummies for hire."

The great forest fires in the Northwest are attributable in part, according to Gifford Pinchot, to the niggardly policy of Congress in not affording means to provide against such disasters by constructing trails, roads, telephone lines, and furnishing a reasonable number of men for patrol.

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