Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 9.djvu/383

 MOOT POINTS IN SOCIOLOGY 369

The corporate form leaves the choice of means and methods to the worshipful few your aldermen, directors, or trustees. Now, these know that they stand or fall by results. If the fruits of their management are sweet, who will scan too curiously the means employed? They are bidden succeed. If from scruples they fail, others less scrupulous will take their places. Suppose, moreover, the directors regard their power as a sacred trust, or are devoted heart and soul to the aggrandizement of their group. In such case their very conscientiousness will blunt their impulses to justice. Their esprit du corps will qualify their allegiance to moral standards. One altruism will block the other. This is why good men on behalf of their group will stoop to misdeeds they would shrink from committing for themselves.

More rarely than other group-units does a corporation pursue wicked ends. If the corporation is without sentiment, neither does it come into being in order to glut some diabolic passion. It never wantonly razes, burns, kills, tortures. Chosen openly, deliberately, and under the sobering influence of the sagacious, its goals bear inspection. This, no doubt, is why the corporation is so often legitimized and adopted as a regular social organ.

But in its choice of means the corporation is less scrupulous than most other collectivities. Its sins are not prompted by anger or vindictiveness, but by pure egoism. The more complex its organization, the more Machiavellian will the corporation show itself in the pursuit of its ends. It is unmoved by generosity or malevolence. It knows no standard but success. It cherishes no malice, but woe to him who stands in its path. It gravitates toward its goal with the ruthlessness of a lava- stream. Remember the church's way with "disturbers," Pascal's arraignment of Jesuit ethics, Reade's expost of trades-union crimes, Brigham Young's Danites, the black record of joint-stock companies ! As for the state, the organ of the national group, its crimes are mountain-high. For calling the state's lies diplomacy, its violences war, its murders punishment, and its robberies annexation or indemnity cannot change the complexion of such actions.