It was vital to destroy the Northern Securities Company; but the men creating it had done so in open and above-board fashion, acting under what they, and most of the members of the bar, thought to be the law established by the Supreme Court in the Knight sugar case.

But the Supreme Court in its decree dissolving the Standard Oil and Tobacco Trusts, condemned them in the severest language for moral turpitude; and an even severer need of condemnation should be visited on the Sugar Trust.
However, all the trusts and big corporations against which we proceeded--which included in their directorates practically all the biggest financiers in the country--joined in making the bitterest assaults on me and on my Administration.

Of their actions I wrote as follows to Attorney-General Bonaparte, who had been a peculiarly close friend and adviser through the period covered by my public life in high office and who, together with Attorney-General Moody, possessed the same understanding sympathy with my social and industrial program that was possessed by such officials as Straus, Garfield, H.K.Smith, and Pinchot.

The letter runs: January 2, 1908.
My dear Bonaparte: I must congratulate you on your admirable speech at Chicago.

You said the very things it was good to say at this time.