Among the big corporations themselves, even where they did wrong, there was a wide difference in the moral obliquity indicated by the wrongdoer.  There was a wide distinction between the offenses committed in the case of the Northern Securities Company, and the offenses because of which the Sugar Trust, the Tobacco Trust, and the Standard Oil Trust were successfully prosecuted under my Administration.  It was vital to destroy the Northern Securities Company; but the men creating it had done so in open and above-board fashion, acting under what they, and most of the members of the bar, thought to be the law established by the Supreme Court in the Knight sugar case.  But the Supreme Court in its decree dissolving the Standard Oil and Tobacco Trusts, condemned them in the severest language for moral turpitude; and an even severer need of condemnation should be visited on the Sugar Trust.

However, all the trusts and big corporations against which we proceeded—­which included in their directorates practically all the biggest financiers in the country—­joined in making the bitterest assaults on me and on my Administration.  Of their actions I wrote as follows to Attorney-General Bonaparte, who had been a peculiarly close friend and adviser through the period covered by my public life in high office and who, together with Attorney-General Moody, possessed the same understanding sympathy with my social and industrial program that was possessed by such officials as Straus, Garfield, H. K. Smith, and Pinchot.  The letter runs: 

January 2, 1908.

My dear Bonaparte: 

I must congratulate you on your admirable speech at Chicago.  You said the very things it was good to say at this time.  What you said bore especial weight because it represented what you had done.  You have shown by what you have actually accomplished that the law is enforced against the wealthiest corporation, and the richest and most powerful manager or manipulator of that corporation, just as resolutely and fearlessly as against the humblest citizen.  The Department of Justice is now in very fact the Department of Justice, and justice is meted out with an even hand to great and small, rich and poor, weak and strong.  Those who have denounced you and the action of the Department of Justice are either misled, or else are the very wrongdoers, and the agents of the very wrongdoers, who have for so many years gone scot-free and flouted the laws with impunity.  Above all, you are to be congratulated upon the bitterness felt and expressed towards you by the representatives and agents of the great law-defying corporations of immense wealth, who, until within the last half-dozen years, have treated themselves and have expected others to treat them as being beyond and above all possible check from law.