ty if they deliberately choose to resign into the hands of great
wrongdoers the control of the corporations in which they own the stock.
Of course innocent people have become involved in these big corporations
and suffer because of the misdeeds of their criminal associates. Let
these innocent people be careful not to invest in corporations where
those in control are not men of probity, men who respect the laws; above
all let them avoid the men who make it their one effort to evade or defy
the laws. But if these honest innocent people are in the majority in
any corporation they can immediately resume control and throw out of
the directory the men who misrepresent them. Does any man for a moment
suppose that the majority stockholders of the Standard Oil are others
than Mr. Rockefeller and his associates themselves and the beneficiaries
of their wrongdoing? When the stock is watered so that the innocent
investors suffer, a grave wrong is indeed done to these innocent
investors as well as to the public; but the public men, lawyers and
editors, to whom I refer, do not under these circumstances express
sympathy for the innocent; on the contrary they are the first to protest
with frantic vehemence against our efforts by law to put a stop to
over-capitalization and stock-watering. The apologists of successful
dishonesty always declaim against any effort to punish or prevent it on
the ground that such effort will "unsettle business." It is they who by
their acts have unsettled business; and the very men raising this
cry spend hundreds of thousands of dollars in securing, by speech,
editorial, book or pamphlet, the defense by misstatement of what they
have done; and yet when we correct their misstatements by telling the
truth, they declaim against us for breaking silence, lest "values be
unsettled!" They have hurt honest business men, honest working men,
honest farmers; and now they clamor against the truth being told.

The keynote of all these attacks upon the effort to secure honesty in
business and in politics, is expressed in a recent speech, in which the
speaker stated that prosperity had been checked by the effort for the
"moral regeneration of the business world," an effort which he denounced
as "unnatural, unwarranted, and injurious" and for which he stated the
panic was the penalty. The morality of such a plea is precisely as great
as if made on behalf of the men caught in a gambling establishment when
that gambling estab