When you offer the securities, of a great corporation to anybody who wishes to purchase them, you must open that corporation to the inspection of everybody who wants to purchase.  There must, to follow out the figure of the tenement house, be lights along the corridors, there must be police patrolling the openings, there must be inspection wherever it is known that men may be deceived with regard to the contents of the premises.  If we believe that fraud lies in wait for us, we must have the means of determining whether our suspicions are well founded or not.  Similarly, the treatment of labor by the great corporations is not what it was in Jefferson’s time.  Whenever bodies of men employ bodies of men, it ceases to be a private relationship.  So that when courts hold that working men can not peaceably dissuade other working men from taking employment, and base the decision upon the analogy of domestic servants, they simply show that their minds and understandings are lingering in an age which has passed away.  This dealing of great bodies of men with other bodies of men is a matter of public scrutiny, and should be a matter of public regulation.

Similarly, it was no business of the law in the time of Jefferson to come into my house and see how I kept house.  But when my house, when my so-called private property, became a great mine, and men went along dark corridors amidst every kind of danger in order to dig out of the bowels of the earth things necessary for the industries of a whole nation, and when it came about that no individual owned these mines, that they were owned by great stock companies, then all the old analogies absolutely collapsed, and it became the right of the government to go down into these mines to see whether human beings were properly treated in them or not; to see whether accidents were properly safeguarded against; to see whether modern economical methods of using these inestimable riches of the earth were followed or were not followed.  If somebody puts a derrick improperly secured on top of a building or overtopping the street, then the government of the city has the right to see that that derrick is so secured that you and I can walk under it and not be afraid that the heavens are going to fall on us.  Likewise in these great beehives where in every corridor swarm men of flesh and blood, it is the privilege of the government, whether of the State or of the United States, as the case may be, to see that human life is properly cared for, and that human lungs have something to breathe.

These, again, are merely illustrations of conditions.  We are in a new world, struggling under old laws.  As we go inspecting our lives to-day, surveying this new scene of centralized and complex society, we shall find many more things out of joint.