trols the
corridors; the lighting department of the city sees to it that the
halls are abundantly lighted. The city does not deceive itself into
supposing that that great building is a unit from which the police are
to keep out and the civic authority to be excluded, but it says: "These
are public highways, and light is needed in them, and control by the
authority of the city."

I liken that to our great modern industrial enterprises. A corporation
is very like a large tenement house; it isn't the premises of a single
commercial family; it is just as much a public affair as a tenement
house is a network of public highways.

When you offer the securities, of a great corporation to anybody who
wishes to purchase them, you must open that corporation to the
inspection of everybody who wants to purchase. There must, to follow
out the figure of the tenement house, be lights along the corridors,
there must be police patrolling the openings, there must be inspection
wherever it is known that men may be deceived with regard to the
contents of the premises. If we believe that fraud lies in wait for us,
we must have the means of determining whether our suspicions are well
founded or not. Similarly, the treatment of labor by the great
corporations is not what it was in Jefferson's time. Whenever bodies of
men employ bodies of men, it ceases to be a private relationship. So
that when courts hold that working men can not peaceably dissuade other
working men from taking employment, and base the decision upon the
analogy of domestic servants, they simply show that their minds and
understandings are lingering in an age which has passed away. This
dealing of great bodies of men with other bodies of men is a matter of
public scrutiny, and should be a matter of public regulation.

Similarly, it was no business of the law in the time of Jefferson to
come into my house and see how I kept house. But when my house, when my
so-called private property, became a great mine, and men went along
dark corridors amidst every kind of danger in order to dig out of the
bowels of the earth things necessary for the industries of a whole
nation, and when it came about that no individual owned these mines,
that they were owned by great stock companies, then all the old
analogies absolutely collapsed, and it became the right of the
government to go down into these mines to see whether human beings were
properly treated in them or not; to see whether accide