Woodrow Wilson, chief sage of Princeton University, is the latest of the academic guides who offers to pilot us out of the gloom.
“Trusts,” remarks Woodrow (who, just between you and me, is something of a prig), “Trusts can never be abolished.”
“We must moralize them.”
“The thing that keeps water in stocks is secrecy.”
“Publicity is the remedy.”
When we hear the chief sage of Princeton droning and driveling this sort of nonsense we wonder whether his mind is fixed upon the actual men, methods and standards of today, or whether he gropes in some Arcadia of the past.
“Moralize the Trusts?”
How will you do it, impractical prig?
Mr. Rockefeller is moral, isn’t he? Goes to church every Sunday, endows Baptist colleges, sends young John to teach Sabbath school and attend English revivals, prates of morality and the Bible to equal any Pecksniff that ever stole the livery of the Lord to shear the sheep in.
Yet where was there ever a more ruthless criminal on the face of the earth than Rockefeller’s Oil Trust?