Looking back and summing up the course of events for a series of
years, it may be said that there was created over night a number of
entities empowered with extraordinary and far-reaching rights and
powers of ownership.

These entities were called corporations, and were called into being
by law. Beginning as creatures of law, the very rights, privileges
and properties obtained by means of law, soon enabled them to become
the dictators and masters of law. The title was in the corporation,
not in the individual; hence the men who controlled the corporation
swayed the substance of power and ownership. The factory was usually
a personal affair, owned by one man or in co-partnership; to get
control of this property it was necessary to get the owner in a
financial corner and force him to sell out, for, as a rule, he had no
bond or stock issues. But the railroad corporation was a stock
corporation; whoever secured control of a majority of the stock
became the legal administrator of its policies and property. By
adroit manipulation, intimidation, superior knavery, and the corrupt
domination of law, it was always easy for those who understood the
science of rigging the stock market, and that of strategic
undermining, to wrest the control away from weak, or (treating the
word in a commercial sense) incompetent, holders. This has been long
shown by a succession of examples.


THE LEGALIZING OF CUNNING

Thus this situation, so singularly conflicting with the theoretical
majesty of the law, was frequently presented: A band of men styling
themselves a corporation received a perpetual charter with the most