corporations accountable. We believe that what we shall have to say on these subjects will have the more weight if our policy is obviously controlled by judgment in which a measure of intelligence is apparent about the function of aggregated capital.
The fact is that our era is a period of experimentation with almost untried possibilities of industrial combination. It is quite possible that the organization of production and circulation and distribution toward which we are tending will be so different from present arrangements that all attempts to imagine it are at fault. This being the case, we oppose to the assumption that industrial combination is robbery, the counter assumption that industrial combination is progress. The final truth doubtless lies somewhere between these two extremes; viz., perfected combination, restrained and controlled by just principles, and operated in all its departments by just men, will signalize an advanced social condition. The substitution of more for less effective industrial organization may necessarily, as in the substitution of machinery for hand labor, involve enormous hardship to individuals. The men who are devising and testing new powers of organization may nevertheless, like the great mechanical inventors, turn out to have done more for the human race in applying their talents to industrial administration, than through the sum of their acknowledged benefactions, by which ignorant people assume that rich men alone justify their existence.
Our correspondent exemplifies a defective method of thought, second, in his allusion to Professor Bemis. Certain newspapers, for reasons about which it is needless to speculate, have labored to create the impression that the relations of Professor Bemis to the University of Chicago are of public interest, because he is the victim of gag-rule in that institution. The only persons who know the facts have repeatedly assured representatives of the press that nothing in the case is of any interest to the public, because no principle in which the public is concerned is in any way involved. The reference above nevertheless presupposes the right to believe anonymous newspaper writers, and to reject the statements of responsible University officials.
When the veracity of persons in a quasi public position has thus been challenged by the newspapers, there is room for difference of opinion about the wisdom of further utterances in support of previous denials. Thus far, and in our judgment for good and sufficient reasons, the authorities of The University of Chicago have adopted one
