They are not entitled to the slightest pity if they deliberately choose to resign into the hands of great wrongdoers the control of the corporations in which they own the stock.
Of course innocent people have become involved in these big corporations and suffer because of the misdeeds of their criminal associates.

Let these innocent people be careful not to invest in corporations where those in control are not men of probity, men who respect the laws; above all let them avoid the men who make it their one effort to evade or defy the laws.

But if these honest innocent people are in the majority in any corporation they can immediately resume control and throw out of the directory the men who misrepresent them.

Does any man for a moment suppose that the majority stockholders of the Standard Oil are others than Mr.Rockefeller and his associates themselves and the beneficiaries of their wrongdoing?
When the stock is watered so that the innocent investors suffer, a grave wrong is indeed done to these innocent investors as well as to the public; but the public men, lawyers and editors, to whom I refer, do not under these circumstances express sympathy for the innocent; on the contrary they are the first to protest with frantic vehemence against our efforts by law to put a stop to over-capitalization and stock-watering.

The apologists of successful dishonesty always declaim against any effort to punish or prevent it on the ground that such effort will "unsettle business." It is they who by their acts have unsettled business; and the very men raising this cry spend hundreds of thousands of dollars in securing, by speech, editorial, book or pamphlet, the defense by misstatement of what they have done; and yet when we correct their misstatements by telling the truth, they declaim against us for breaking silence, lest "values be unsettled!" They have hurt honest business men, honest working men, honest farmers; and now they clamor against the truth being told.
The keynote of all these attacks upon the effort to secure honesty in business and in politics, is expressed in a recent speech, in which the speaker stated that prosperity had been checked by the effort for the "moral regeneration of the business world," an effort which he denounced as "unnatural, unwarranted, and injurious" and for which he stated the panic was the penalty.