e that you can get any
action by any state, I do not believe it practicable to get action by
all the states that will give us satisfactory control of the trusts, of
big corporations; and the result is at present that we have a great,
powerful, artificial creation which has no creator to which it is
responsible. The creator creates it and then it goes and operates
somewhere else, and there is no interest on the part of the creator to
deal with it. It does not do anything where the creator has power; it
operates entirely outside of the creator's jurisdiction.

It is, of course, a mere truism to say that the corporation is the
creature of the state, that the state is sovereign. There should be a
real and not a nominal sovereign, some one sovereign to which the
corporation shall be really and not nominally responsible. At present if
we pass laws nobody can tell whether they will amount to anything. That
has two bad effects. In the first place, the corporation becomes
indifferent to the lawmaking body; and in the next place, the lawmaking
body gets into that most pernicious custom of passing a law not with
reference to what will be done under it, but with reference to its
effects upon the opinions of the voters. That is a bad thing. When any
body of lawmakers passes a law, not simply with reference to whether
that law will do good or ill, but with the knowledge that not much will
come of it, and yet that perhaps the people as a whole will like to see
it on the statute books--it does not speak well for the lawmakers, and
it does not speak well for the people either. What I hope to see is
power given to the national legislature which shall make the control
real. It would be an excellent thing if you could have all the states
act on somewhat similar lines so that you would make it unnecessary for
the national government to act; but all of you know perfectly well that
the states will not act on similar lines. No advance whatever has been
made in the direction of intelligent dealing by the states as a
collective body with those great corporations.

I am not advocating anything very revolutionary. I am advocating action
to prevent anything revolutionary. Now if we can get adequate control by
the nation of these great corporations, then we can pass legislation
which will give us the power of regulation and supervision over them.
If the nation had that power, I should advocate as strenuously as I know
how that the power should be