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Page 30
True, the managers of large corporations can make their protests heard.
They can publish their pleas in the newspapers, and issue pamphlets, and
they can appear before committees and commissions, and submit arguments.
The managers of small corporations cannot afford such measures. You might
as well refer a servant-girl who couldn't collect her wages, to the Hague
Tribunal, as to send a plain business man to Washington to plead his
cause.
The animus of these statutes is hostility to great corporations. But it is
impossible to legislate against great corporations without hitting the
small ones. Take the case of the recent corporation income tax; the
244,000 corporations exempt from the tax had to make out their inventories
and keep their books and report their proceedings precisely as if they
were liable to the tax. A fine of from $1,000 to $10,000 and a 50 per
cent. increased assessment were the penalties for failure. But the cost of
complying with all the requirements of the law, for a corporation having
an income of two or three thousand dollars, cannot be figured at much less
than the tax. Many corporations have no net income. The managers of these
concerns are not expert book-keepers, and their returns must be in many
cases so inaccurate as to expose them to prosecution if the game were
worth the candle. If we assume that the average cost of making out the
return is only ten dollars, we have a bill of $2,400,000, which the
stockholders, or the employees, or the customers, must pay for the
privilege of demonstrating that the small corporations are not liable to
pay anything at all.
The corporation income tax law was really an act of popular dislike of
corporations exercising great monopolies. Grouping all the little
corporations with them was an absurdity and a cruelty.
Corporations have no feelings. They are not wounded by the hostility of
legislatures. The managers of corporations of large capital have feelings,
and some of them are wounded in their pride by this hostility. But they
need not suffer in their pockets. They are abundantly able to protect
their own property; they know how to make money on the short side of the
market as well as the long side. But the managers of the concerns of small
capital are seldom able to do this. Oppressive laws cause suffering to
them, to the mere holders of stock in all corporations, to the creditors
of all, to the employees, and to the customers. Many of these laws profess
to be meant to favor small people as against big people--to restrain the
rich corporations so that the poor ones may have more liberty. There is no
evidence to show that this result is attained, or that the country would
be better off if it were attained. But there is plenty of evidence to show
that half the people of the country are suffering from these legislative
attacks on their property. The men who manage the great corporations,
whatever their faults, are men of enterprise and courage. They are the
true progressives; the prosperity that they diffuse among the whole people
is ordinarily more than can be destroyed by our progressive politicians.
They are now beginning to feel that their rulers are discriminating
against them as a class, and are uneasy and disheartened, and reluctant to
embark in new enterprises; and the progress of the country is halted by
their apprehension. It is not the rich who suffer most: it is "the
unemployed," and the millions of dumb, helpless, struggling thrifty men
and women whose hard earned savings constitute a large part of the capital
of the corporations; and who are already alarmed at the shrinking value of
these savings. It is, perhaps most of all, the mass of ignorant unthrifty
poor, whose chief wealth is the wages paid them by the corporations which
they are taught to look on as their oppressors.
RAILWAY JUNCTIONS
In his illuminating essay on _The Lantern-Bearers_, Stevenson complains of
the vacuity of that view of life which he finds expressed in the pages of
most realistic writers. "This harping on life's dulness and man's meanness
is a loud profession of incompetence; it is one of two things: the cry of
the blind eye, _I cannot see_, or the complaint of the dumb tongue, _I
cannot utter_." And then, with a fine flourish, he declares:--"If I had no
better hope than to continue to revolve among the dreary and petty
businesses, and to be moved by the paltry hopes and fears with which they
surround and animate their heroes, I declare I would die now. But there
has never an hour of mine gone quite so dully yet; if it were spent
waiting at a railway junction, I would have some scattering thoughts, I
could count some grains of memory, compared to which the whole of one of
these romances seems but dross."
"If it were spent waiting at a railway junction" ... Here, with his
instinct for the perfect phrase, Stevenson has pointed a finger at the one
experience which is commonly accepted as the acme of imaginable dulness.
This man, who could be happy at a railway junction, could not have found a
prouder way of boasting to posterity that he had never "faltered more or
less in his great task of happiness."
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