consolidation, which might have resulted in the ownership of all the railroads in the United States by a single person. Then followed the process of "unscrambling the omelet," to use J. P. Morgan's phrase, in order to bring the companies already illegally merged within the letter of the law. Probably a lynx-eyed investigator might discover that in some of the efforts to legalize operations in the future, "the voice was Jacob's, but the hands were the hands of Esau." The laws aimed at regulating transportation, rates, and rebates, certainly made for justice, and helped to enlighten great corporations as to their place in the community and their duties towards it. Roosevelt showed that his fearlessness had apparently no bounds, when in 1907 he caused suit to be brought against the Standard Oil Company in Indiana--a branch of a monopoly which was popularly supposed to be above the law--for receiving a rebate from a railroad on the petroleum shipped by the Company. The judge who tried the case gave a verdict in favor of the Government, but another judge, to whom appeal was made, reversed the decision, and finally at a re-trial, a third judge dismissed the indictment. "Thus," says Mr. Ogg, "a good case was lost through judicial blundering." * * Ogg, 50. But the greatest of Roosevelt's works as a legislator were those which he carried through in the fields of conservation and reclamation. He did not invent these issues; he was only one of many persons who understood their vast importance. He gives full credit to Mr. Gifford Pinchot and Mr. F. H. Newell, who first laid these subjects before him as matters which he as President ought to consider. He had himself during his days in the West seen the need of irrigating the waste tracts. He was a quick and willing learner, and in his first message to Congress (December 1, 1901) he remarked: "The forest and water problems are perhaps the most vital internal problems of the United States." Years later, in referring to this part of his work, he said: 'The idea that our natural resources were inexhaustible still obtained, and there was as yet no real knowledge of their extent and condition. The relation of the conservation of national resources to the problems of national welfare and national efficiency had not yet dawned on the public mind. The reclamation of arid public lands in the West was still a matter for private enterprise alone; and our magnificent river system, with its superb possibilities for public usefulness, was dealt with by the National Government not as a unit, but as a disconnected series of pork-barrel problems, whose only real interest was in their effect on the reelection or defeat of a Congressman here and there--a theory which, I regret to say, still obtains.'* * Autobiography, p. 430.