uch laws is the infamous tobacco legislation of 1902,
which authorized the Tobacco Trust to continue to collect from the
people the Spanish War tax, amounting to a score of millions of dollars,
but to keep that tax instead of turning it over to the government, as it
had been doing. Another example is the shameful meat legislation, by
which the Beef Trust had the meat it sent abroad inspected by the
government so that foreign countries would take its product and yet was
permitted to sell diseased meat to our own people. It is incredible that
laws like these could ever get on the Nation's statute books. The
invisible government put them there; and only the universal wrath of an
enraged people corrected them when, after years, the people discovered
the outrages.

It is to get just such laws as these and to prevent the passage of laws
to correct them, as well as to keep off the statute books general laws
which will end the general abuses of big business that these few
criminal interests corrupt our politics, invest in public officials and
keep in power in both parties that type of politicians and party
managers who debase American politics.

Behind rotten laws and preventing sound laws, stands the corrupt boss;
behind the corrupt boss stands the robber interest; and commanding these
powers of pillage stands bloated human greed. It is this conspiracy of
evil we must overthrow if we would get the honest laws we need. It is
this invisible government we must destroy if we would save American
institutions.

Other nations have ended the very same business evils from which we
suffer by clearly defining business wrong-doing and then making it a
criminal offense, punishable by imprisonment. Yet these foreign nations
encourage big business itself and foster all honest business. But they
do not tolerate dishonest business, little or big.

What, then, shall we Americans do? Common sense and the experience of
the world says that we ought to keep the good big business does for us
and stop the wrongs that big business does to us. Yet we have done just
the other thing. We have struck at big business itself and have not even
aimed to strike at the evils of big business. Nearly twenty-five years
ago Congress passed a law to govern American business in the present
time which Parliament passed in the reign of King James to govern
English business in that time.

For a quarter of a century the courts have tried to make this law work.
Yet d