The Bridgeport evening farmer., 1911-09-18
PRESIDENT TAFT DEFENDS
 OIL AND TOBACCO DECISION
 0F U. s. SUPREME COURT

| late contract in restraint of trade
 that ought to come within the statute 1 that does not come within it undel
 the decision of the Supreme Court.
 | 1t is said that the Supreme Court
 has read something into the statute that was not there before; that ii
 has inserted the word reasonable | before restraint of trade, when the l same court had said that this could l not be properly done, because con- gress had evidently not intended tc | include such a limiting word in the
 statute. This is not fair to the court
 It is true that the court in the early | days of the construction of the stat
 ute. had said that it could not limit
 the statute in effect by excluding l from it's operation what was demeeo | reasonable at common law. But as l other cases arose it found it neces- l operation of the words restraint of l trade,'' and it did so by excepting l what was minor, or incidental, or in- direct, and, including only those cases where the chief object of the contract | Or combination was the restraint. In
 doing so the court said that it must | give the statute a reasonable con- ! structiOn and not one leading to ab-
 surd or ridiculous results. Tn the last two eases the court did not change the substance of the reason | ing and scope of the previous deci- l sions, but only treated the exceptions l previously termed incidental and in-
 direct" as excluded from the opera. l tion of the statute in the light of | reason, i. e., in conformity to the evil sought to be reached. Now, in what way has this injured the public veal? | What combinations or arrangements
 can escape under this interpretation that any sensible man would wish to | have condemned? Did the court not | condemn the Standard Oil Co.,, the l father of all trusts, in the history of which every form of criminal illegal l ity was practiced? Did it not, on the | other hand, condemn the Tobacco l Trust, of much later origin and fram- l ed under the advice of cunning coun- l sel for the very purposes of evading | the condemnation of the statute and l at the same time securing and enjoy | ing the monopoly the framers of the | statute intended to prevent and pun | ish?
 Let me renew again the invitation l to any of the vociferous critics of 1 the decision of the Supreme Court to l the facts Of a case not condemned within the rule of construction, put upon the statute by the Supreme | Court, but included within their con- struction of it. which reasonable men would think it wise or proper to make criminal.
 Now, I desire to call attention to a very broad distinction that many persons have failed to draw or per- ceive between a reasonable construc- tion of the statute which the Supreme Court has insisted upon and the in- troduction of the word reasonable" in the statute so as to lead to a result 6x, ;ol- h fIa
 pose of restraining trade with a view
 to controlling prices and maintaining
 a monopoly could be held to be rea-
 sonable and thus lawful. Until the
 decision of the Supreme Court in
 these last two cases there was a
 clearly defined hope in the minds of
 many business men. who had reached
 the conclusion that it. was impossible to conduct business on a free competi-
 tive basis, and that it was necessary
 to secure monopolistic control of
 prices and competition in order to
 make business reasonably profitable,
 that in some way Or other the statute
 could be construed so as to make it
 apply only to unreasonable monopo-
 lies and unreasonable exclusion of
 competition and control of prices.
 They had in their minds the thought
 that in some way or other standard
 could be set by which if those who
 enjoyed the monopoly and the re-
 straint of competition and the control
 of prices did not abuse their power
 to the point of seeking from the pub lie exorbitant profits, their arrange
 ments could be held to be only req
 sonable and not within the statute or
 punishable by law. In my message
 of January 2. 1910, on the interstate
 federal incorporation, I used this
 language:
 Many people conducting great bus- inesses have cherished hope and a belief that in some way Or other a line may be drawn between good trusts" and 'sbad trusts, and that it is possible by amendment to the anti
 trust law to make distinction under which good combinations may be per- mitted to organize, suppress competi- tion, control prices, and do it all le- gally if only they do not abuse the power by taking too great profit out of the business. They point with force to certain notorious trusts as having grown into power through criminal methods by. the use of H- legal rebates and plain cheating, and by various acts utterly violative of business honesty or morality, and urge the establishment of some legal line of separation by which criminal trusts of this kind can be punished, and they, on the OCner nand, be per mitted under the law to carry on their business. Now the public, and espe- ciaily the business public, ought to rid themselves of the idea that such distinction is practicable or can be introduced into the statute Ger tainIy under the present antitrust law no such distinction exists It has been proposed, however, that the word "rea sonable'' should be made a part of the statute, and then that it should be left to the court to say what is a reasonable restraint of trade, what is a reasonable suppress sion of competition, what is a rea- sonable monopoly I venture to think that this is to put into the hands of the court a power impossible to exer- else on any consistent principle which | will insure the uniformity of decision | essential to just judgment. It is to | thrust upon the courts a burden that | they have no precedents to enable | them to carry, and to give them a. 1 power approaching the arbitrary, the 1 abuse of which might involve our | whole judicial system in disaster.
 This paragraph has been quoted and | spread on the record of the Senate on | the motion of a Senator who consid- | cred this to be at variance with the | decisions of the Supr eme Court. In stead of being at variance, it is in | exact accord with those decisions.
 Again, from those who have given | up free competition as an economic | force that ought to be encouraged or l