over a river at a certain locality, the state has, and must have, the power to make conflicting grants when the public needs seem to require them; and the progress of the state might be embarrassed or stayed by improvident or dishonest concessions if this were otherwise. The new grant in such case does not impair the obligation of the other, but the obligation is recognized in giving compensation for exclusive privilege."[1]
But we must turn to a third question: What is the present operative or practical relation between corporations and the state? The facts are, first, that there is no authoritative code of corporation ethics to which the public can appeal in judgment of corporations; and, on the other hand, corporation managers have evidently very vague conceptions of their functional and ethical relations to the public. There was a notable struggle in Chicago recently over a certain franchise, involving the use of streets in the vicinity of its plant by one of our largest manufacturing corporations. The president of one of the most important commercial organizations in the city told the writer, while the contest was going on, that he had just discussed the points in controversy with a high officer of the encroaching company, and that official seemed utterly incapable of entertaining the idea that the citizens in general had any proper rights in the public streets which the corporation was bound to respect.
It would be trite and commonplace to multiply illustrations of the reversal by corporation managers of the functional and ethical relation upon which society predicates corporate privileges. The morbid and extreme suspicion of corporations, and especially of trusts as such, to which reference was made at the outset, is the natural consequence of corporate defiance of obligation to the sanctioning and sustaining public. The popular mind is at present tending to the view that capitalistic organizations are inherently and necessarily evil. Innumerable corporations are acting on the presumption that the public is a mine, to be worked for all it is worth till the lead runs out. A
- ↑ West River Bridge Co. vs. Dix, 6 Hon., 507; Eastern R. R. Co. vs. B. and M. R. R. Co., iii Mass., 125; also Judge Gaynor in re Brooklyn Heights R. R. Co.
