-courtesy of Tom Giessel
Mr. Reed on Corporations.
The Greenwood club met last night for the first time this season at the public library to listen to an address on “Corporations” by James A. Reed, public prosecutor. The attendance was representative of the club’s membership, the room being crowded with persons from nearly every walk of life. Mr. Reed was particularly severe on corporations. He said that every corporation was organized through dishonest motives; that it was with the hope of crushing out a rival or to monopolize some line of trade or industry. He gave two reasons for the abolition of corporations. First, that they were dishonest; and, second, that they tend to crush out individual effort. He advocated, as a remedy, the abolishment of private corporations and the ownership, by the government, of railroads and other public enterprises.
“These issues are being forced upon the people,” he said, “by aggressive and persistent abuses of the trusts and combines which, in every avocation of trade and business, are seeking to set up and establish monopoly. A trust is after all only a corporation which has arrived at maturity and the abuses chargeable to it legitimately and logically spring from the very powers granted to corporations.
“It may be a long time in the future, but the day is certainly coming when the last vestige of private corporations will have been, by an indignant and outraged people, obliterated from the face of this continent; when the people will look with wonder upon an age whereby public law institutions were created and granted powers which resuited in general and wholesale robbery and such robbery received the protection of courts of justice.”-Kansas City Star
