A few well-known cases will illustrate the evil use of the Court's fictive discourse. In 1894, the Court had to decide whether the Sherman Anti-Trust Act could be applied to break up a 98 percent monopoly of sugar refining in this country, and in 1936, it had to decide whether the federal government could impose fair labor standards on the coal mining industry. But we do not often investigate the literary expression of the Court's ideology. In that early era of unfettered business enterprise, the poetic vision of the Court was that manufacture and mining were spatially and temporally separate operations aport from commerce. The functions of commerce are different.
Commerce disposes of it.
It connotes the absence of an efficient inter- vening agency or condition. The metaphor of a mechanical, disjointed set of operations needed no more explicit expression. The Court drew upon the decadent but still hardy view of the Newtonian universe of atomistic and determined operations, one in which perhaps some equally mechanical hand dictated Adam Smith economics. No longer is the figure of commercial activity one of production mechanically dis- jointed from exchange, but production is rather the germ of a grand organic simile, one with a throbbing heart, arteries, veins, organs, senses and dimensions that reach into every state. The organic figure differs from the mechanical metaphor in four ways.