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Show THE CITIZEN the ways of righteousness and announced that henceforth it would obtain each and every fatted calf by deserving it. The government struck a cold trail. It imagined that the'U. S. Steel Corporation could not reform. Once bad always bad, was the government theory. Here was a perfectly upright, decorous and even pious corporation, with a chastened spirit and a glistening soul, leading the life of a good citizen, when the government agents burst suddenly from ambush and arrested it for the crimes of its youth. And when the case came to trial the prodigal son pleaded his re. form and won. The United States Supreme Court declared that a corporation could reform. It decided that even though a corporation had once been a monopoly in restraint of trade it could not be punished for what it had done. If Mr. Corporation was leading a virtuous life at the time of the arrest and showed every indication of continuing in the straight and narrow path he was not to be torn limb from limb because had sowed wild oats and had occasionally thrashed his inde- pendent neighbors. Says the majority opinion: It resorted to none of the brutalities or tyrannies that the case illustrates of other combinations. It did not secure freight rates; it did not increase its profits by reducing the wages of its employees whatever it did was not at the expense of labor; it did not increase its profits by lowering the quality of its products, nor create an artificial scarcity of them ; it did not oppress or coerce its competitors its competition, though fierce, was fair ; it did not undersell its competitors in some localities by reducing prices there below those obtained elsewhere, or require its customers to enter into contracts limiting their purchase or restricting them in resale prices ; it did not obtain customers by secret rebates or departures from its published prices ; there was no evidence that it attempted to crush its competitors by unfair means and in its competition it seemed to make no difference between large and small competitors. There will be raucous yells of rage and protest from those who refuse to admit that there can be such a thing as a good corporation. But sensible men everywhere will agree that the supreme courts decision will have a stabilizing effect on business because it will assure our business men that no matter how big an enterprise may be it will not be battered in pieces by the government so long as its practices are above reproach. All over the world the rights of property are being assailed. The result is the bankruptcy and beggary of peoples. In our own country the United States supreme court establishes effective barriers againsl these attacks and thereby preserves prosperity. In his dissenting opinion Justice Day says that if he understands the majority opinion it holds that a corporation, though formed in plain violation and bold defiance of law, is immune from punishment and dissolution because of some reasons of public policy. That is not our understanding of the decision. The court simply holds that the publics welfare will not be served by ruling that a corporation ought to be dissolved because it has the power to do wrong or because it once was guilty of vicious practices. In the present, the corporation is not a monopoly in restraint of trade and to dissolve it because some day it might backslide and break the law would be against public policy. ENGLISH HOME RULE FOR ERIN the Americans fail to grasp, says Viscount Bryce in Manchester Guardian, is that the Irish question is no longer a question between England and Ireland, but between the WHAT K Irish people themselves. If that is true why is it that England is attempting to fasten a home rule bill of its own making on Ireland? The Irish people of all religious persuasions excepting only the Ulster handful say that the question is not religious and they point out that Robert Emmett, Parnell and, in fact, most of the great nationalist leaders, were Protestants. And coming nearer to our own day they emphasize the fact that the chieftains of the Easter Day rebellion in 1916 were intellectuals of various religious faiths. And i 1 8 among them was that strange, sad, ' fantastic Roger Casement, hu manitarian knighted by the Englishman government, who was hanged as a traitor. Tlie home rule bill which Lloyd George, the clever Welshman, is striving to foist upon Ireland, assumes that religion is at the base of the problem, thereby recognizing the Ulster claim which is repudiated by virtually all the rest of Ireland. How slight is the Ulster claim was demonstrated only a few weeks ago in the Uslter elections when the Nationalist, Sinn Fein and Labor parties triumphed over the Unionists. The home rule bill is what might have been expected of Lloyd George, the premier who thought the time had come to ignore American idealism in the settlement of the Adriatic question. True, Europe, even under the new dispensation, even after the United States has saved her from disaster by achieving victory on the field of France and Belgium, may justly claim the right to settle her own affairs, but what Europe cannot claim is a right to settle anything unjustly. That is no mans right, no nations right. And yet so deeply is tyranny bred in the bone of European ruling classes that American love of liberty passes by them like a ghost pleading in the mists with wan arms in the name of justice and humanity. Sinn Fein may be a mistake, as the Eastern rebellion was a mistake wild and foolish. Complete separation from Great Britain may not be the solution. On that point no less a personage than Cardinal Logue has recently expressed his doubts and fears. But the solution certainly does not lie in a hypocritical home rule bill which is designed to give a handful of Ulsterites their stubborn and prejudiced way, in a bill which seeks to beguile the Irish with a semblance , of home rule while giving England the right to maintain the army and police in Ireland, to control trade and even to strike down that trade as it did a hundred years. ago when it absolutely wiped out the wool trade by an edict. If the Irish were to frame a declaration of their grievances today would they not address themselves to King George in this tenor? He has dissolved Representative Houses repeatedly, for opposing with manly firmness his invasions on the rights of the people. He has made Judges dependent on his will alone. He has erected a multitude of new offices and sent hither swarms of officers to harass our people and eat out their substance He has kept among us, in times of peace, standing armies without the consent of our legislature. He has affected to render the military independent of and superior to the civil power. He has combined with others to subject us to a jurisdiction foreign to our constitution, and unacknowledged by our laws, giving assent to their acts of pretended legislation : For quartering large bodies of armed troops among .us. For depriving us in many cases of the benefits of trial by jury. For transporting us beyond seas to be tried for pretended offenses. For abolishing the free system of English laws in neighboring province, establishing therein an arbitrary government. He has abdicated government here by declaring us out of his ' -- . s f r protection and waging war against us. He has plundered our seas, ravaged our coasts, burned our towns and destroyed the lives of our people. He is, at this time, transporting large armies of foreign mercenaries to complete the works of death, desolation and tyranny, already begun with circumstances of cruelty and perfidy scarcely paralleled in the most barbarous ages, and totally unworthy the head of a civilized nation. Such a proclamation would serve a double purpose. It would inform the world of some of the grievances of Ireland and- it .would is acquaint the world once again with the document from which it Conquoted, the American Declaration of Independence adopted .in gress, July 4, 1776, at Philadelphia. It is well that Great Britain and all the states of Europe should renew acquaintance with that immortal document, for it tells of the cries spirit of liberty and justice which is abroad in the earth and it out to all the world that America is still for freedom and justiqc and - |