er drew bills designed to conceal franchise grabs or tax
evasions, or crooked contracts with dummies in subsidiary
corporations organized to bleed a mother concern of its profits.
Some laws not on the books governed him in such matters, so that he
never became an accomplice in these forms of thievery. He did more
than pray "lead us not into temptation"; he kept both of his keen
eyes open to make sure that he did not fall into it, and when he
found that he had fallen, he quickly made every effort to extricate
himself. This meant that he turned away volumes of business which
would have brought large returns, but he would not have his office
fouled by this stream of corruption any more than he would seek
health in a sewer. When these degenerate concerns were admitted to
his office, they came as penitents seeking reformation. His regular
clients were the corporations who had come to take his view, that a
big business must be laid on broad and deep foundations of
integrity all-around; that all compromises with blackmailing
legislatures are but makeshifts; that the thing to seek is justice,
not only for themselves, but with a greater zeal for the people
whose resources they use. The whole solution of our economic
problems, in the mind of this simple student of the law--including
its ninety per cent. of human nature--lay in the corporations
training their lawyers upon themselves as their most unmerciful
critics--as conscience, the censor, lays down the laws which every
strong individual must follow or meet his doom in ruin. The
underlying principles of the thing involving millions were as
simple in his mind as the obligation to pay his washerwoman, if he
were to maintain his self-respect. The officers and directors of a
corporation, he believed, could no more successfully cheat the
State of its just taxes, or rob the stockholders by paying them a
small profit on their holdings while draining the earnings of the
concern with their subsidiary National Packing & Transportation
Companies, United States Terminal Companies and American Warehouse
& Bonding Corporations, without in the end reaping the reward of
their crimes. Mr. MacDonald would no more give his consent to the
swindling of innocent stockholders by their trustees, than he would
rob an apple-stand. He had that rare discernment so seldom found
now among big business men and their lawyer followers--he could see
the wrong involved in the stealing of a million dollars and wo