CONSTITUTIONAL LAW 571 



producers, they substitute five, twenty, a hundred thousand stock- 

 holders, and where we may seem to perceive the struggle, there is 

 interested a great quantity of citizens, especially the humble and 

 incapacitated, women, minors, shopkeepers, even beneficent insti- 

 tutions, even universities and great scientific societies, a larger 

 s}^stem of participation in benefices, than we might even have 

 imagined. To think a concentration of all capitalist forces, which 

 may necessarily correspond a general league for the most violent 

 struggle of classes to the bloody social revolution, is an exaggeration. 

 Here, more than elsewhere, helps a proverb of the ancient Greeks 

 who were comparing the liberty governed by the law to the lance of 

 Achilles, which had the twofold virtue of wounding and of healing. 

 In fact President Roosevelt gives to his state the New York 

 Business Company Act of 1900; afterwards creates the federal 

 ministry of commerce and finds in Philander Knox his Merlin. 

 Putting aside the trial of an always extremely difficult reform of the 

 federal constitution, the battle will continue in the courts of justice 

 which, armed with the anti-trust law of Sherman, are striking inexor- 

 ably; and therefore, beginning from the Beef Trust and the Railroad 

 Trust, provoked the summary justice of the Stock Exchange. Such 

 frightful institutions, appearing at the beginning of social revolution, 

 are falling down like paper castles built by children. Nicolo Mac- 

 chiavelli, who left us precious political instructions, says: " That the 

 things beyond their natural foundation are not lying, neither resist." 



The American plutocracy will not be mightier than Ca?sar and 

 Charlemagne, than Gregory VII or Napoleon, if it will pretend to 

 check the laws of nature or to change the course of history. What 

 did not succeed among despots who could glory that they were 

 descended from Jupiter, who could dispose of an unlimited power 

 and proclaim themselves to be the state in face of an ignorant and 

 subjected mob, without energy and even political conscience, cannot 

 succeed in a free land to an only potency, even the greatest, as it 

 did not succeed with John Locke to transfer to South Carolina the 

 English feudalism, or to the Jesuits of Paraguay the celebrated 

 constitution regulating even the hours of conjugal debt, as criminal 

 sociology will never succeed to suppress the born delinquents, or 

 electoral legislations to prevent the bribery. 



The solutions are perhaps easier in Europe, where there is accorded 

 to the state a more complete action, in merit of which it appears 

 more organic and stronger and is able to strike severely, as yesterday 

 in Germany, socialism; to-day the religious congregations in France; 

 to-morrow, perhaps, in England or elsewhere, the trusts or other 

 social manifestations. And yet there continues among us, especially 

 on the Continent, the doctrine of patriarchal government of society; 

 therefore the greatest interests, of which here voluntary associations, 



