The Editor’s Bag "And when they're swollen up so stout You'd think they'd surely bust, They souse 'em once again. and out They come at last a Trust. "And when the Trust is ready for One last and final whack. They let the public in the door To buy the water back."
If you still have an appetite for roasted corporations, 1 refer you to Hazlitt’s essay, On Corporate Bodies, or to the speeches of
the disap-"peerless" leader of the Democratic party, which show up the corporation as the right bower of His Satanic Majesty. You have noticed, perhaps, that few dis cover the water in stock except those who dabble in it. The American people have a fatal tendency to play with the corporation, to indulge themselves in beautiful green and gold certificates that look like government bonds, to take shares in some pot of gold at
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you, not roasted, but with the praise of whipped cream, glacéd fruits, preserved mar rons, and other delicatessen, and with Chateau
Yquem or sparkling Chablis or Veuve Cliquot and bunches of violets and an orchestra play ing Viennese waltzes on the side. But the corporation is its own excuse; it is attracting
more favorable notice on the part of the intelligent public all the time—already two thirds of the business of the country is con ducted under the corporate form, and great minds are at work trying to perfect this form of business conduct so that it will be a per fect machine, and so that the souls of its
ofiicers and directors will serve in lieu of a corporation soul, and so that both the unit of organization and the members who com pose it will be openly responsible for all their acts to the state, the public, and to one another. The only eflective way to unify the membership of a large number of men in
the end of a rainbow, even when the com
lodges, unions, clubs, secret societies, fraterni
pany would appear to be like that of which dear old Colonel Carter's financial agent said: "I couldn't raise a dollar in a lunatic asylum full of millionaires on a. scheme like the oolonel's." But we have to look with indul gence on this frailty of our compatriots they are getting experience, and like most of mankind, experience is the one thing they can't accept without paying in full for it. The emotions and the imagination always command their price even when intelligence is selling at a discount. The American people are great, but they are not quite up to old Noah yet-he is the only person so far who has been able to float a company when the whole world was in liquidation. I am very heartily an advocate of the cor porate form of business organization, brother
ties, so as to make them a practically respon sible business person, so they may stand be fore the community and say, "We are here to deal honestly with you, but if you think you have not been accorded all your rights, we can easily be reached through the law which
Fijis, and I could cite many eminent authori
ties who have the same attitude. Woodrow Wilson, President of Princeton University, has said, "I don't see how our modern civili zation could dispense with corporations. I don't see anything but the utmost folly in entering upon a course of destruction in respect to the present organization of our economic life." Our brother in Phi Gamma Delta, Edward Alsworth Ross, Professor in the University of Wisconsin, who writes bril liant essays for the Atlantic Monthly on sin and society, says: “Corporations are necessary. In resenting corporate sins we must follow the maxim, ‘Blame not the tool, but the hand
that moves the tool.’"
If I were able,
brothers, I would serve the corporation to
unites us unto a business unit, by which we
can be brought to justice as a unit, under one name, and not compel you to sue a collection of us as individuals"—the only effective way, I say, to unify a society to this end is to incorporate it. Now it may not have oc curred to you that our fraternity is not incor porated. Some of our chapter house asso ciations are incorporated, but the national
organization is not, and in this we are behind some of our rival fraternities. I do not believe it is necessary to do more than sug gest the desirability of the incorporation of the national society through the Board of Archons, as I believe the social conscience of
the fraternity is sufiiciently alive to demand this when the lack has become generally known among us. The length of an after dinner speech, it is said, should correspond to that of the ballet daneer's skirt, "qm' commencait a peine et finissait déja," and, to follow the formula, I
must be ending. It was an enthusiastic member of another fraternity, which I may call Beta Kappa Delta, because there is no such fraternity, who exclaimed in concluding a speech, "Old Beta Kappa Delta! There she stands with her glorious past. Let us drink to her memory." It is unnecessary to com
