punishing or even
fining an offending corporation is in the last sense ridiculous. It is
necessarily paid by the innocent stockholders or the public. There
is always some one person or a number of persons who have _done_
or suffered the things complained of; after all, every act of the
corporation is necessarily done by some one or more individuals. We
must get over our metaphysical habit of treating corporations as
abstract entities, and again recognize that they are but a definite
number of natural persons bound together only for a few definite
interests and with real men as officers who should be fully
responsible for their actions. Indeed, it ought to be simpler to
detect and punish offenders than in the case of mere individuals
unincorporated, for the very fact that a corporation keeps books and
acts under an elaborate set of by-laws and regulations gives a clew to
its proceedings, and indicates a source of information as to all its
acts. One clerk may therefore reveal, and properly reveal, books and
letters which shall incriminate "those above"; one employee may show
ten thousand persons guilty of an unlawful combination, and properly
so. There is no reason why he should not, and the nine thousand nine
hundred and ninety-nine others deserve, and are entitled to, no
immunity whatever from his revelation.

The religious rights, although for the most part peculiar to the
American Constitution, adopted by us, indeed, as a result of the
history of the two or three centuries preceding in England, but hardly
in any particular a part of the British Constitution, were by the
reason of our very origin so strongly asserted and so highly valued
with us that no legislation has been found necessary on the subject.
Perhaps the sole important instance in which the question has come up
has been that of instruction in the public schools and the use of the
money raised by common taxation for special religious purposes. Very
generally the latter is forbidden in our State constitutions, the
Federal Constitution by the First Amendment merely protecting the
right from the action of Congress. Owing to decisions of the
Supreme Court, in the South it has become possible to divide school
appropriations between schools for whites and blacks, and it is
presumable that the same thing might be done as, for instance, between
Roman Catholics and others, and something of the sort has, I believe,
been done with the appropriations for the education