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The New Freedom - A Call For the Emancipation of the Generous Energies of a People by Woodrow Wilson
page 14 of 167 (08%)
much more progress than we in handling these things. In the city of
Glasgow, for example (Glasgow is one of the model cities of the world),
they have made up their minds that the entries and the hallways of great
tenements are public streets. Therefore, the policeman goes up the
stairway, and patrols the corridors; the lighting department of the city
sees to it that the halls are abundantly lighted. The city does not
deceive itself into supposing that that great building is a unit from
which the police are to keep out and the civic authority to be excluded,
but it says: "These are public highways, and light is needed in them, and
control by the authority of the city."

I liken that to our great modern industrial enterprises. A corporation is
very like a large tenement house; it isn't the premises of a single
commercial family; it is just as much a public affair as a tenement house
is a network of public highways.

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 workingmen
cannot peaceably dissuade other workingmen from taking employment, as was
held in a notable case in New Jersey, they simply show that their minds
and understandings are lingering in an age which has passed away. This
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