them.  Of such is the famous clause of the recent constitutions of Kentucky and Wyoming that “absolute arbitrary power over the lives, liberty, and property of freemen exists nowhere in a republic, not even in the largest majority.”  In view of the frequently successful efforts of trust magnates and others to escape indictment or punishment by some enforced revelation of their affairs given after a criminal proceeding has has been commenced or before a grand jury, legislation is now strongly urged to withhold them immunity in such cases.  This would relegate us to the early state of things where they would simply refuse to answer, so that it may be doubted if, on the whole, we should gain much.  The right of an Englishman not to criminate himself is too cardinal in our constitutional fabric to be questioned or to be altered without subverting the whole structure.  Practically it would seem as if a little more intelligence on the part of our prosecutors would meet the evil.  Corporations themselves are never immune; and unless the wicked official actually slept with all the books of the corporation under his pillow, it would be hard to imagine a case where some corporate clerk or subordinate officer could not be subpoenaed to produce the necessary evidence.  Indeed, as has been well argued by leading American publicists, the sooner the public learns to go behind the figment of the corporation, the screen of the artificial person, into the human beings really composing it, the quicker we shall arrive at a cure for such evils as may exist.  Legislation punishing or even fining an offending corporation is in the last sense ridiculous.  It is necessarily paid by the innocent stockholders or the public.  There is always some one person or a number of persons who have done or suffered the things complained of; after all, every act of the corporation is necessarily done by some one or more individuals.  We must get over our metaphysical habit of treating corporations as abstract entities, and again recognize that they are but a definite number of natural persons bound together only for a few definite interests and with real men as officers who should be fully responsible for their actions.  Indeed, it ought to be simpler to detect and punish offenders than in the case of mere individuals unincorporated, for the very fact that a corporation keeps books and acts under an elaborate set of by-laws and regulations gives a clew to its proceedings, and indicates a source of information as to all its acts.  One clerk may therefore reveal, and properly reveal, books and letters which shall incriminate “those above”; one employee may show ten thousand persons guilty of an unlawful combination, and properly so.  There is no reason why he should not, and the nine thousand nine hundred and ninety-nine others deserve, and are entitled to, no immunity whatever from his revelation.