There were obvious objections to these practices, and public opinion finally compelled our rulers to pass laws prohibiting them.  Theoretically the managers of corporations are now effectually disfranchised.  They dare not offer themselves as candidates for office.  They scarcely dare to favor, even secretly, the choice of rulers who will listen to them.  Fortunately, however, they hardly longer dare to offer bribes.  Anyone on friendly terms with them is politically a suspicious character.  Any lawyer who has been employed by them becomes unavailable as a candidate for office.  Our legislators, as was to be expected, at once showed the effect of release from restraint.  It has been uncharitably said that in revenge for the loss of their passes and other favors, they attacked the railroads; but there has been considerable voting of more mileage, and our congressmen at least voted themselves ample indemnity in larger salaries, and they opened fire on corporations in general and railroads in particular, with a broadside of statutes.  Against this fire the property of millions of small holders in the corporations has been almost defenceless.  Some of these statutes are so drawn that the plain business man does not know whether he is a criminal or not; if he could afford to consult the best of lawyers it would not help him much.  The only safe course to pursue is to agree with the adversary quickly; to plead guilty to whatever charge is made, and beg for mercy.  That one is innocent is immaterial.  The expense of litigation is nothing to the rulers of the United States; but it may be ruinous to their subjects.  The cost of the commissions and investigations and prosecutions of the last few years has been enormous.  Only lawyers can contemplate it without consternation.

True, the managers of large corporations can make their protests heard.  They can publish their pleas in the newspapers, and issue pamphlets, and they can appear before committees and commissions, and submit arguments.  The managers of small corporations cannot afford such measures.  You might as well refer a servant-girl who couldn’t collect her wages, to the Hague Tribunal, as to send a plain business man to Washington to plead his cause.

The animus of these statutes is hostility to great corporations.  But it is impossible to legislate against great corporations without hitting the small ones.  Take the case of the recent corporation income tax; the 244,000 corporations exempt from the tax had to make out their inventories and keep their books and report their proceedings precisely as if they were liable to the tax.  A fine of from $1,000 to $10,000 and a 50 per cent. increased assessment were the penalties for failure.  But the cost of complying with all the requirements of the law, for a corporation having an income of two or three thousand dollars, cannot be figured at much less than the tax.  Many corporations have no net income.  The managers of these concerns are not expert book-keepers, and their returns must be in many cases so inaccurate as to expose them to prosecution if the game were worth the candle.  If we assume that the average cost of making out the return is only ten dollars, we have a bill of $2,400,000, which the stockholders, or the employees, or the customers, must pay for the privilege of demonstrating that the small corporations are not liable to pay anything at all.