For many of the shortcomings of justice in our country our people as a whole are themselves to blame, and the judges and juries merely bear their share together with the public as a whole.  It is discreditable to us as a people that there should be difficulty in convicting murderers, or in bringing to justice men who as public servants have been guilty of corruption, or who have profited by the corruption of public servants.  The result is equally unfortunate, whether due to hairsplitting technicalities in the interpretation of law by judges, to sentimentality and class consciousness on the part of juries, or to hysteria and sensationalism in the daily press.  For much of this failure of justice no responsibility whatever lies on rich men as such.  We who make up the mass of the people can not shift the responsibility from our own shoulders.  But there is an important part of the failure which has specially to do with inability to hold to proper account men of wealth who behave badly.

The chief breakdown is in dealing with the new relations that arise from the mutualism, the interdependence of our time.  Every new social relation begets a new type of wrongdoing—­of sin, to use an old-fashioned word—­and many years always elapse before society is able to turn this sin into crime which can be effectively punished at law.  During the lifetime of the older men now alive the social relations have changed far more rapidly than in the preceding two centuries.  The immense growth of corporations, of business done by associations, and the extreme strain and pressure of modern life, have produced conditions which render the public confused as to who its really dangerous foes are; and among the public servants who have not only shared this confusion, but by some of their acts have increased it, are certain judges.  Marked inefficiency has been shown in dealing with corporations and in re-settling the proper attitude to be taken by the public not only towards corporations, but towards labor and towards the social questions arising out of the factory system and the enormous growth of our great cities.

The huge wealth that has been accumulated by a few individuals of recent years, in what has amounted to a social and industrial revolution, has been as regards some of these individuals made possible only by the improper use of the modern corporation.  A certain type of modern corporation, with its officers and agents, its many issues of securities, and its constant consolidation with allied undertakings, finally becomes an instrument so complex as to contain a greater number of elements that, under various judicial decisions, lend themselves to fraud and oppression than any device yet evolved in the human brain.  Corporations are necessary instruments of modern business.  They have been permitted to become a menace largely because the governmental representatives of the people have worked slowly in providing for adequate control over them.