The State can properly deal with the corporations doing business within its own limits. The State can not deal at all with corporations doing business in many different States, and it is an absurdity at once ludicrous and harmful to leave it in the power of one State to create a corporation of gigantic size which shall do all its work in a number of other States, and perhaps with the scantiest regard for their laws. Personally, I believe that the Federal Government must take an increasing control over corporations. It is better that that control should increase by degrees than that it should be assumed all at once. But there should be, and I trust will be, no halt in the steady progress of assuming such national control. The first step toward it should be the adoption of a law conferring upon some executive body the power of increased supervision and regulation of the great corporations engaged primarily in interstate commerce of the railroads. My views on that subject could not have been better expressed than they were expressed yesterday by Secretary Taft in Washington, and as they were expressed by the Attorney-General in his communication to the Senate Committee a couple of weeks ago. I believe that the representatives of the Nation—that is, the representatives of all the people—should lodge in some executive body the power to establish a maximum rate, the power to have that rate go into effect practically immediately, and the power to see that the provisions of the law apply in full to companies owning private cars and private tracks, just as much as the railroads themselves. The courts will retain, and should retain, no matter what the Legislature does, the power to interfere and upset any action that is confiscatory in its nature. I am well aware that the action of such a body as I have spoken of may stop far short of confiscation, and yet do great damage. In other words, I am well aware that to give this power means the possibility that the power may be abused. That possibility we must face. Any power strong enough, any power which could be granted sufficiently great to be efficient, would be sufficiently great to be harmful if abused. That is true of the power of taxation. It is perfectly possible for the body that has the power of taxation intrusted to it to use it viciously and harmfully against certain interests or certain classes. Nevertheless, the power must exist. The power must be lodged in the representatives of the people. So it is with the power of which I speak. It must exist; it must be lodged in some body which is to give expression to the needs of the people as a whole. The fact that it is possible that the power may be abused is not, and can not be, an argument against placing it where we shall have a right to expect that it will be used fairly toward all.