knew nothing of its commission and could have done nothing to prevent it if they had known. Remember, that a penalty inflicted upon a corporation is actually inflicted not upon guilty persons but upon innocent investors.

Let me give an illustration of the so-called “reforms” that are recklessly urged upon us to-day and that are to be found in operation here and there throughout the country. I refer to the matter of street franchises. Now it may be true, it probably is true, that in many cases these franchises have become of great value and that they ought not to be granted without adequate return. But would it not be just to remember that when these franchises were originally granted they provided a service that was absolutely essential to the growth of the community and that those who obtained the franchises faced a serious risk to their capital and practically threw in their lot with the prospective welfare of the city? It is hard to realize how serious that risk sometimes was and how problematical were the returns. The shareholders in these street traction corporations are spread over the population and every class of the population is represented in them. They invested their money in good faith at a time when no question had ever been raised as to the propriety of these franchises and at a time when these franchises were considered to be for the public good and indubitably were for the public good. And

I will ask you if it is honest to use all the machinery of the government, all the artifices of the politician to depreciate the value of those franchises, to threaten their holders with confiscation, to hamper and harass them by all the ways that are open to a democratically governed people? I say unhesitatingly that it is dishonest to do these things, and I will go so far as to say—believing as I do in the good faith of the great majority—that most of those who noisily advocate such measures would be ashamed to do so if they would but face the facts and understand what it is that they are actually doing and the wrong that they are inflicting upon innocent men and women. If mistakes have been made in granting franchises, then take care to avoid such mistakes in the future, but do not enter into a bargain that seemed advantageous to yourselves and then repudiate it when you find that it is not so advantageous as you thought. There is no way to reconcile such a thing with common honesty, and it is in no way mitigated by the fact that it is done by a community and by means of a vote rather than by an individual and in the ordinary small affairs of life. We all know what we should say of the man who acted in this way toward ourselves personally, but in advocating some of the schemes that are now recommended to us by sensational politicians, newspapers, and magazines we are making ourselves responsible for a dishonesty far greater than the evils that we are trying to remedy. Let us by all means reform whatever needs to be reformed, but let us do it with clean hands.

Now, I think that I have said enough to justify my belief that these great problems of our social life are not of a kind to be settled off-hand by violent or radical legislation. They are not to be settled by any one scheme or by any one plan. The only way to approach them is by careful and conscientious thought, a minute examination of the facts at first hand and a rigid determination to act toward corporations and business interests in general in the same spirit of unswerving honesty that you would wish to display to a comrade or to a friend and that you would wish to be displayed toward yourselves. You will find that honesty is the royal road to success in commercial life, and it is also the royal road to all reform in our communal life. Do not go out

into the world with any expectation that you will be required to surrender the ideals that you have formed in your youth, or that