in the interest of the
people. The blame in such cases lies with the body which has been
derelict, and not with the body which reluctantly makes good the
dereliction.

A quarter of a century ago, Senator Cushman K. Davis, a statesman who
amply deserved the title of statesman, a man of the highest courage, of
the sternest adherence to the principles laid down by an exacting sense
of duty, an unflinching believer in democracy, who was as little to be
cowed by a mob as by a plutocrat, and moreover a man who possessed the
priceless gift of imagination, a gift as important to a statesman as to
a historian, in an address delivered at the annual commencement of
the University of Michigan on July 1, 1886, spoke as follows of
corporations:

"Feudalism, with its domains, its untaxed lords, their retainers,
its exemptions and privileges, made war upon the aspiring spirit of
humanity, and fell with all its grandeurs. Its spirit walks the earth
and haunts the institutions of to-day, in the great corporations, with
the control of the National highways, their occupation of great domains,
their power to tax, their cynical contempt for the law, their sorcery
to debase most gifted men to the capacity of splendid slaves, their
pollution of the ermine of the judge and the robe of the Senator, their
aggregation in one man of wealth so enormous as to make Croesus seem a
pauper, their picked, paid, and skilled retainers who are summoned by
the message of electricity and appear upon the wings of steam. If we
look into the origin of feudalism and of the modern corporations--those
Dromios of history--we find that the former originated in a strict
paternalism, which is scouted by modern economists, and that the latter
has grown from an unrestrained freedom of action, aggression, and
development, which they commend as the very ideal of political wisdom.
_Laissez-faire_, says the professor, when it often means bind and gag
that the strongest may work his will. It is a plea for the survival of
the fittest--for the strongest male to take possession of the herd by
a process of extermination. If we examine this battle cry of political
polemics, we find that it is based upon the conception of the divine
right of property, and the preoccupation by older or more favored or
more alert or richer men or nations, of territory, of the forces of
nature, of machinery, of all the functions of what we call civilization.
Some of these men, who are really great,