ed. As a matter of fact, a man invests his money just as he invests
in a surgeon. He does not think of directing the surgeon how to operate.
If the operation does not succeed, he tries another surgeon next time--if
there is a next time.

Of course all this applies chiefly to the large corporations. There are
many thousands of small ones, having few stockholders, who reside where
the business is established. These stockholders know more or less of the
details of the business; they can judge to some extent how it is carried
on, they are often acquainted with the managers, or are the managers
themselves, and if not, they are able sometimes to combine and change the
management. And I will anticipate a little and say here that the property
of such a corporation located in a small town is often to some extent not
politically disfranchised, because the people of the town understand that
they are directly interested in the prosperity of the business. But it
seems almost impossible for the stockholders to change the management of a
large corporation. It has been done a few times. Mr. Harriman notoriously
did it by using the money of one concern to buy the stock of another, and
that is almost the only way in which it has been done. No doubt there has
been an immense deal of combination which has resulted in change of
management, but this has not been because the stockholders combined to
oust their trustees, but because they thought they saw a good chance to
sell their stock to those who would pay high for the control, or to
participate in these combinations. There have been a good many cases where
an enterprising speculator has managed to get hold of a majority of the
stock and change the control, and powerful bankers can sometimes get
proxies enough to put a stop to bad management; but spontaneous movements
of this kind on the part of the mass of the stockholders are extremely
rare.

Beyond dispute then, the great mass of wealth held by corporations is
almost wholly under the control of their managers, and not the mass of the
owners. Mr. Hill has recently testified that he never knew a stockholder
to attend a meeting except to make trouble; by which he perhaps meant that
when a single stockholder appeared, it was to get paid for not making
trouble.

* * * * *

It need hardly be said that no such thing as legitimate representation of
corporate wealth is known in our politics, and the representati