you had done. You have shown
by what you have actually accomplished that the law is enforced against
the wealthiest corporation, and the richest and most powerful manager
or manipulator of that corporation, just as resolutely and fearlessly as
against the humblest citizen. The Department of Justice is now in very
fact the Department of Justice, and justice is meted out with an even
hand to great and small, rich and poor, weak and strong. Those who have
denounced you and the action of the Department of Justice are either
misled, or else are the very wrongdoers, and the agents of the very
wrongdoers, who have for so many years gone scot-free and flouted the
laws with impunity. Above all, you are to be congratulated upon the
bitterness felt and expressed towards you by the representatives and
agents of the great law-defying corporations of immense wealth, who,
until within the last half-dozen years, have treated themselves and have
expected others to treat them as being beyond and above all possible
check from law.

It was time to say something, for the representatives of predatory
wealth, of wealth accumulated on a giant scale by iniquity,
by wrongdoing in many forms, by plain swindling, by oppressing
wage-workers, by manipulating securities, by unfair and unwholesome
competition and by stock-jobbing,--in short, by conduct abhorrent to
every man of ordinarily decent conscience, have during the last few
months made it evident that they are banded together to work for a
reaction, to endeavor to overthrow and discredit all who honestly
administer the law, and to secure a return to the days when every
unscrupulous wrongdoer could do what he wished unchecked, provided he
had enough money. They attack you because they know your honesty and
fearlessness, and dread them. The enormous sums of money these men have
at their control enable them to carry on an effective campaign. They
find their tools in a portion of the public press, including especially
certain of the great New York newspapers. They find their agents in
some men in public life,--now and then occupying, or having occupied,
positions as high as Senator or Governor,--in some men in the pulpit,
and most melancholy of all, in a few men on the bench. By gifts to
colleges and universities they are occasionally able to subsidize in
their own interest some head of an educational body, who, save only a
judge, should of all men be most careful to keep his skirts clear from
t