Page:The Presidents of the United States, 1789-1914, v. IV.djvu/219

WILLIAM HOWARD TAFT 179 and morals; prescribing penalties for the white slave traffic; facilitating the collection of damages for injuries suffered by an interstate railroad em ployee in the line of his duty; and other equally progressive measures. What will probably be longest remembered as the distinguishing feature of the Taft administra tion was its impartial pursuit of the trusts. Former administrations had picked out for punishment, here and there, a particularly flagrant viola tion of the Sherman law, or one committed by a corporation whose greed had made it widely dis liked, or one in which the chief offenders were per sonally conspicuous. Mr. Taft refused to make distinctions of any sort. In George W. Wicker- sham, of New York, he had chosen for his attorney- general a lawyer who had long been prominent as an adviser of corporations, believing that one who had studied these organizations from the inside would know best how to bring them to book when they transgressed the law. Mr. Wickersham organized a bureau whose sole business was to hunt down suspicious cases and marshal evidence. The sugar, beef, lumber, paper, window-glass, bathtub, wire, steel, electric-light, harvester, shipping, and shoe-machinery combinations were among the im portant concerns he attacked, his bills in equity and indictments reaching a total of more than seventy, as against an aggregate of sixty-two to