Woodrow Wilson’s Appeal longer so far as their business, its activities, or its moralities are concerned. They must do what they are told to do, or lose their con nection with modern affairs. They are not at liberty to ask whether what they are told to do is right or wrong. And yet there are men here and there with whom the whole choice lies. There is more individual power than ever, but those who exercise it are few and formidable and the mass of men are mere pawns in the game. "Corporations do not do wrong. Individuals do wrong, the individuals who direct and use them for selfish and illegitimate purposes to the injury of society and the serious curtail ment of private rights. You cannot punish corporations. Fines fall upon the wrong persons-upon the stockholders and the customers rather than upon the men who direct the policy of the business. If you dissolve the offending corporation you throw great undertakings out of gear. . . . “Many modern corporations wield revenues and command resources which no ancient state possessed and which some modern bodies politic show no approach to in their budgets. And these huge industrial organizations we continue to treat as legal persons, as individ uals, which we must not think of as consisting
of persons, within which we despair of enab ling the law to pick out anybody in particular to put either its restraint or its command upon. It is childish, it is futile, it is ridicu lousl . . . “In respect of the responsibility which the law imposes in order to protect society itself, in order to protect men and communities against wrongs which are not breaches of contract but ofienses against the public interest, the common welfare, it is imperative
that we should regard corporations as merely groups of individuals, from which it may, per haps, be harder to pick out particular persons for punishment than it is to pick them out of the general body of unassociated men,
but from which it is, nevertheless, possible to pick them out, possible not only, but absolutely necessary, if business is ever again to be moralized. . . . "You will say that in many instances it is not fair to pick out for punishment the particular ofiicer who ordered a thing done, because he really had no freedom in the matter; that he is himself under orders,
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is a dummy manipulated from without. I reply that society should permit no man to carry out orders which are against law and public policy, and that if you will but put one or two conspicuous dummies in the penitentiary there will be no more dummies for hire. You can stop traflic in dummies, and then, when the idea has taken root in the corporate mind that dummies will be confiscated, pardon the one or two in nocent men who may happen to have got into jail." In conclusion, Dr. Wilson returned to the
theme of the responsibility of the individual lawyer to the community at large to aid in the solution of the stupendous legal problems which are impending over the country at the present time. “We are upon the eve," he said, “of a great reconstruction. It calls for creative states manship as no age has done since that great age in which we set up the government under which we live, that government which was
the admiration of the world until it suffered wrongs to grow up under it which have made many of our own compatriots question the freedom of our institutions and preach revo lution against them. I do not fear revolution. I do not fear it even if it comes. I have unshaken faith in the power of America to keep its self-possession. If revolution comes, it will come in peaceful guise, as it came when
we put aside the crude government of the confederation and created the great federal state which governed individuals, not corpora
tions, and which has been these hundred and thirty years our vehicle of progress. And it need not come. I do not believe for a moment that it will come. Some radical changes we must make in our law and practice. Some reconstructions we must push forward which a new age and new circumstances impose upon us. But we can do it all in calm and sober fashion, like statesmen and patriots. Let us do it also like lawyers. Let us lend a hand to make the structure symmetrical, well-proportioned, solid, perfect. Let no future generation have cause to accuse us of having stood aloof, indifierent, half hostile,
or of having impeded the realization of right. Let us make sure that liberty shall never repudiate us as its friends and guides. We are the servants of society, the bond-servants of justice."
