i66

GREEN BAG

the direction of exercising and securing this adequate control over the great cor porations, and it was under the leadership of one of the most honored public men in our country, one of Pennsylvania's most emi nent sons, the present Senator and then Attorney General Knox, that the new departure was begun." Mr. Root said in his speech at the Repub lican National Convention in 1904. "The Attorney General has gone in the same practical way not to talk about the trusts but to proceed against the trusts by law for their regulation; " reviewing then the results achieved in the four types of cases to which I have referred. And Mr. Moody in a speech of 1904, describing the work of the Department of Justice in some detail, said : "Perhaps more important than any of the individual cases which were begun or finished by Mr. Knox was the vitalizing of the Sherman Law and the demonstration in the courts that the power of the Nation is supreme over interstate commerce in all its activities." And in another speech in 1906, referring to Mr. Knox and his Pittsburgh speech of 1902, Mr. Moody said: "Following these words with his acts as Attorney General in the important litiga tion which he began and in a large measure concluded, he made for himself a pre-emi nent place in the history of the nation. However long and however well he may serve this commonwealth in the councils of the nation, 'he will never do aught which will add more to his enduring fame than that which he said and did as Attorney General of the United States." Besides these professional and public achievements in this direction of the great est current interest, the anti-trust move ment, which were thus characterized on various occasions by his chief and colleagues, Mr. Knox during his administration insti tuted the peonage prosecutions, intervened in a private case and established the safely

appliance law for the safety of the public and railway employees, obtained the very important decision of the Supreme Court that traffic in lottery tickets between States is an obnoxious traffic and within the interstate power of Congress, that the power to regulate commerce includes the power to prohibit an immoral traffic. Under him the constitutionality of the oleomargarine law was sustained; the gross postal frauds of 1904 were prosecuted and punished; and the great land fraud cases of the northwest were begun and vigorously pursued. He considered and solved the problems, domestic and international, in volved in the laying of the Pacific cable, and the arrangements made with the United States for Government business and for control in various contingencies of war and peace; and the other great public work of the Panama Canal came before him in the negotiations with the Government of France and the French company and the various intricate transactions pertaining to the acquirement and passing of the title to the property, all of which he personally directed, proceeding abroad for that pur pose. The case of the extradition of Gaynor and Greene was another important matter effected by his grasp of mind and capacity to deal with great legal and governmental matters. A former Solicitor General of England and one of the leaders of the British bar advised the United States Government that on the ground that the habeas corpus proceedings in the Canadian courts, resulting in the discharge of the defendants, were final, an appeal to the Privy Council would probably not lie or leave to appeal would not be granted. But • Attorney General Knox, construing the Privy Council jurisdiction, as it certainly is, as one of grace with a wide and liberal advisory power over all colonial judgments within the discretion and pleasure of the Crown, pursued an appeal and vas success ful, the ultimate surrender of Greene and Gaynor to this Government being founded