Albion Woodbury Small

“ It is hard for the ordinary man to understand that a railroad corporation is not held to be above the law-making power, when a state law regulating railroads within the state is declared unconstitutional by a United States court, on the ground that the law is a regulation of commerce. Yet, in spite of such afflictions to the lay mind, the accepted rules of law are sufficiently explicit to leave no proper doubt that in theory corporations are held to be accountable to the people for their stewardship of public trusts. ”

“ Let there be careful study of the developing needs and opportunities of society, and let the results of study declare themselves in developing legal principles of social self-control. I am not now referring to any particular measures, but to the principle that legislation which creates corporations without corresponding regulation is as anomalous and socially dangerous as a regime of domestic relations ruled solely by the instinct of propagation, without responsibilty for the training of children. ”

“ The first lesson in political economy of which I have any distinct recollection was to the effect that no government can carry on any industrial enterprise as profitably as it can be managed by individuals. As an abstract proposition this may be true. It cannot at present be proved or disproved. It has been abundantly demonstrated, however, that governments can and do carry on some very important classes of business with financial, political and social advantages to the whole public, incomparably superior to those obtainable previously from private performance of the same service. ”

“ The most definite and workable definition of a semi-public corporation that I can propose or discover is that it is every corporation which is not public. The public corporation is distinguished in kind from other corporations by the fact that it is inclusive and involuntary. All other corporations are exclusive, but at the same time they are related to the members of the body politic, because whatever they do sooner or later in some measure affects these fellow-citizens. ”

“ In the second place, let us encourage legislation that shall prescribe the lines within which corporate action must recognize public interest. I admit that this is only another way of saying: Let us face the necessity of evolving superior citizens in order that there may be superior legislators. In other words let public opinion register itself in authoritative public standards as rapidly as the social consciousness becomes intelligent. ”

“ No legislative franchise has any more of the attributes of divinity than the law of entail or of primogeniture. Corporations are presumptively servants, not masters, of the public. They are to be judged by their performances, and should be treated accordingly. A corporation which is deficient in the discharge of its delegated function should be restored to usefulness by vigorous measures, if necessary, just as the proper public authority should repair a bad road. ”

“ I am sure of this, that so long as men agree to maintain society, they will more and more agree that the question of private or corporate or public control of the industrial opportunities upon which the good of all depends is in the last resort a question of administration. Is the public welfare most likely to be subserved by public or by proxy management? ”

“ A quickened social consciousness is assuming the rigt, the privilege, the duty of life—"life more abundant," in the individual and in society. As never before in the history of society, we are anticipating problems of social order, and proposing solutions, instead of being satisfied to explain solutions after the centuries have worked them out. We are learning to formulate what we want as freely in civics as in mechanics. We are learning to set ourselves in as businesslike fashion in the one field as in the other to the task of getting our wants supplied. ”

“ Corporate hands are wont to act as though they would say, "I am the body!" There will be no more important and complicated legislative tasks in the epoch on which we have entered, than those which are already upon us in the necessity of reducing these usurping organs to normal vicarious agency within the social body.
Third, let us by all means fit ourselves to assume direct public control of many properties which belong by nature to the public; properties which we have hitherto farmed out at enormous public sacrifice. ”

“ The end will not be till every toiler with hand or brain has secured social guarantee of more secure industrial status. The coming lot of the capable and faithful laborer will be as superior to his present condition of industrial dependence and insecurity as the political status of citizens in a democratic republic is to that of the unprivileged class in ancient oligarchies. I calculate confidently upon progressive public absorption of corporate and monopolistic advantages as a certain incident of this glorious gain. ”

“ We are passing through the benevolent despot stage of corporate development—that is, so far as the despots are benevolent. The imminent social task in this connection is to convert corporate power to the service of benevolent democracy. ”

“ It is as reactionary for us to treat capitalistic organizations indiscriminately and on principle as beasts of prey, to be baited at will whenever we can catch them at disadvantage, as it was for the English peasantry to resist the building of railroads, or for the Russians, of whom Wallace and Tolstoi tell, to demolish improved farm implements. On the other hand, the day is past in which men can be awed into acquiescence in the divine right of corporations. ”

“ Until we have developed and applied, much beyond present standards, the policy and practice of social agency on the part of individuals in the conduct of business, direct public control, and even public management of many kinds of business is the dictate of reason, of prudence and of patriotism. ”

“ Enormous private gains from operation of franchises to supply these public needs is, in itself, evidence not so much of the culpability of the corporations as of the unthrift and political inefficiency and supineness of the people. ”

“ Innumerable corporations are acting on the presumption that the public is a mine, to be worked for all it is worth till the lead runs out. A change of public opinion is unlikely, therefore, until there is an evident change of front in corporate management. ”

“ Each is the means at present most available for discharging its respective kind of function. With reference to the corporation our problem is, how may we secure just that function without defect or excess, and without disturbance of the other functions of society? We have to learn how to secure for the public the advantages of monopoly, administered in the anti-monopolistic spirit. ”

“ Better than all, some of the choice and master spirits of our age are showing by word and deed that in these tasks of peace there is service to be rendered and renown to be won not less splendid than the victories and laurels of war. ”

“ At the same time, it must be confessed that the complexity of our administrative and judicial system has been a stumbling block to many persons of large intelligence who have not been specially instructed in constitutional law. The interlocking state and federal jurisdictions, the curiously distributed powers of regulating commerce, of enforcing police regulations, of sanctioning and interpreting and enforcing contracts, etc., seem to the uninitiated to furnish easy means of nullifying the popular will as expressed in the laws. ”

“ Whatever more direct measures we may hereafter devise, to reduce the evils of corporate selfishness and to harness capitalistic organization to public tasks, society cannot afford to persist in rule-of-thumb policies toward agencies with such enormous capacity to promote or to endanger the public good. ”

“ Both patriots and traitors use firearms, and they both use public franchises. They alike choose these latter means because they are economically effective. If we have the purest zeal for the common good that has ever fired the soul of ancient or modern reformers, we cannot apply that zeal to best purpose among our industrial problems without setting it to the task of perfecting the checks and balances of industrial combination, which corporations of all kinds have begun to apply. ”

“ It would be trite and commonplace to multiply illustrations of the reversal by corporation managers of the functional and ethical relation upon which society predicates corporate privileges. The morbid and extreme suspicion of corporations, and especially of trusts as such, to which reference was made at the outset, is the natural consequence of corporate defiance of obligation to the sanctioning and sustaining public. The popular mind is at present tending to the view that capitalistic organizations are inherently and necessarily evil. ”

“ Whether we speak of private corporations or semi-public corporations, we are in reality using varied terms for what is essentially the same thing. The parish, the school district, the village, the county are public corporations. The legal persons not falling in this class are bodies that move and have their being within the societies making up the public corporations, and are properly distinguishable from each other only by the difference of degree in which their corporate conduct affects the public. ”

“ In this light they are seen to be properly inventions that deserve social endorsement, in so far as they promote the public weal. There is no more sacredness about a corporation in itself, apart from its service to society, than there is about an ox-yoke or a tide-mill. Charter privileges imply corresponding corporate services; they imply that the party making the grant, as well as the party accepting it, is better off because of the arrangement than before. ”

“ There is a very general superstition that the legal person known as a corporation may dawdle, and waste, and neglect and destroy, but that the party paying for its presumed services may not discharge the unprofitable servant. The superstition goes further, and believes that for a moderate Wehrgeld a corporation may rob, maim, oppress, banish, kill, but that it may neither be executed nor disfranchised for its felony. ”

“ They have not said "legislatures should do nothing," but "legislatures should not do the wrong thing, and they will do the wrong thing till men put more brains and fairness and knowledge of affairs into legislation." ”

“ But if we cease to venerate without learning to appreciate, we may harm ourselves worse in the first instance than by retaining the dominant superstition. Between ceasing to pray to idols and beginning to smash them is a shorter step than to the intelligent use of them as monuments of art and indexes of culture. ”

“ It would be as rational to set about improving the type of human beings by attempting to breed the nervous system out of our bodies, as to calculate upon social progress without development of the coordinating agency of legislation. ”

“ We are also generally agreed in taking for granted the doctrine of public corporations, familiar since the Dartmouth College case, viz., that a public corporation is the legally recognized body of people in a given area; the body so constituted existing for the benefit of all its constituents; the constituents meanwhile, so long as they reside within the area, having no choice about membership of the corporation. ”

“ Men must be taught to distinguish between these devices, as controllable social agencies, and on the other hand the unsocial personal volition, which at present often acts the rôle of a possessing devil perverting the agency. Men must be taught to study the social adaptabilities of capitalistic organization as expectantly as we study the applications of electrical energy. Everybody except the anarchist anticipates the next grand social gain through some manner of extension of the principles of industrial organization. ”

“ When we are ready to rewrite history upon the hypothesis that the discoverers, the inventors, the leaders of previous generations, have been so many retarders of civilization, we shall be prepared to continue autobiography of our own period in terms of the abuse which restless men are heaping upon organizations of capital without discrimination. ”

“ An exclusive privilege only gives to the franchise additional value as property, and all property is subject to be taken and appropriated to public uses on making payment therefor. Therefore, notwithstanding the existence of an exclusive grant to construct a railroad between two named places, or a bridge over a river at a certain locality, the state has, and must have, the power to make conflicting grants when the public needs seem to require them ”

“ It should be no secret, among men capable of considering the interests involved in contemporary social conditions, that no man is likely to have his mental vision accurately focused upon the present situation unless he has learned to look occasionally upon our institutions through the lenses of socialism. ”

“ For nineteen centuries Christians have been preaching and trying to believe that we are members one of another; that we must work together in order to live ourselves out. We are just beginning to realize this conception intimately in devices by which many scattered financial interests are bound into a closely knitted whole. ”