If the former, he has
defended many malefactors, and he knows well that, thanks to the advice
of lawyers like himself, a certain kind of modern corporation has been
turned into an admirable instrument by which to render it well nigh
impossible to get at the really guilty man, so that in most cases the
only way of punishing the wrong is by fining the corporation or by
proceeding personally against some of the minor agents. These lawyers
and their employers are the men mainly responsible for this state of
things, and their responsibility is shared with the legislators who
ingeniously oppose the passing of just and effective laws, and with
those judges whose one aim seems to be to construe such laws so that
they cannot be executed. Nothing is sillier than this outcry on behalf
of the "innocent stockholders" in the corporations. We are besought to
pity the Standard Oil Company for a fine relatively far less great than
the fines every day inflicted in the police courts upon multitudes of
push cart peddlers and other petty offenders, whose woes never extort
one word from the men whose withers are wrung by the woes of the mighty.
The stockholders have the control of the corporation in their own hands.
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