If the limitations of space did not forbid, it would be interesting to show how this fact, more than any other (and not any willingness to leave loopholes for dishonesty) makes possible such offences as those which, committed by certain financial institutions in New York, were the immediate precipitating cause of the recent panic. Growth has been so rapid that, with the best will in the world to erect safeguards against malfeasance, weak spots in the barricades are, as it were, only discovered after they have been taken advantage of. With the preoccupation of the legislators stable doors are only found to be open by the fact that the horses are already in the street.
But, after all has been said in extenuation, there remain many things in American State laws for which one may find explanation but not much excuse.
Reference has already been made to the entirely immoral attitude of many of the State legislatures towards corporations, especially towards railway companies; and in some of the Western States prejudice against accumulated wealth is so strong that it is practically impossible for a rich man or corporation to get a verdict against a poor man. It would be easy to cite cases from one's personal experience wherein jurors have frankly explained their rendering of a verdict in obvious contradiction of the weight of evidence, by the mere statement that the losing party "could stand it" while the other could not. Of a piece with this is a class of legislation which has been abundant in Western States, where the legislators as well as most of the residents of the States have been poor, giving extraordinary advantages to debtors and making the collection of debts practically impossible. In some cases such legislation has defeated itself by compelling capitalists to refuse to invest, and wholesale traders to refuse to give credit, inside the State.
Yet another source of corruption in legislation is to be found in the mere numerousness of the States themselves. It may obviously inure to the advantage of the revenues of a particular State to be especially lenient in matters which involve the payment of fees. It is evidently desirable that a check should be put on the reckless incorporation of companies with unlimited share capital, the usual form of such a check being, of course, the graduation of the fee for incorporation in proportion to such capital. One State which has laws more generous than any of its neighbours in this particular is likely to attract to it the incorporation of all the companies of any magnitude from those States, the formal compliance with the requirements of having a statutory office, and of holding an annual meeting, in that State being a matter of small moment. Similar considerations may govern one State in enacting laws facilitating the obtaining of divorce.
There are, then, obviously many causes which make the attainment of either an uniform or a satisfactory code of jurisprudence in all States alike extremely difficult of attainment. It will only be arrived at by, on the one hand, the extension of the Federal authority and, on the other the increase in population and wealth (and, consequently, a sense of responsibility) in those States which at present are less forward than their neighbours. But, again, it is worth insisting on the fact that the faults are faults of the several States and not of the United States. They do not imply either a lack of a sense of justice in the people as a whole or any willingness to make wrong-doing easy. But it is extremely difficult for the public opinion of the rest of the country to bring any pressure to bear on the legislature of one recalcitrant State. The desire to insist on its own independence is indeed so strong in every State that any attempt at outside interference must almost inevitably result only in developing resistance.
And again I find myself regretfully in direct conflict with Mr. Wells. But it is not easy to take his meditations on American commercial morality in entire seriousness.
"In the highly imaginative theory that underlies the reality of an individualistic society," he says (The Future in America, p. 168), "there is such a thing as honest trading. In practice I don't believe there is. Exchangeable things are supposed to have a fixed quality called their value, and honest trading is I am told the exchange of things of equal value. Nobody gains or loses by honest trading and therefore nobody can grow rich by it." And more to the same effect.
A trader buys one thousand of a given article per month from the manufacturer at ninepence an article and sells them to his customers at tenpence. The extra penny is his payment for acting as purveyor, and the customers recognise that it is an equitable charge which they pay contentedly. That is honest trading; and the trader makes a profit of a trifle over four pounds a month, or fifty pounds a year.