The Bridgeport evening farmer., 1911-09-18
(Continued from Page 1.)

can people for now 20 years that o1 industrial combinations known as Trusts During the last year we have had two great decisions by the Supreme Court of the United States They are epoch making, and the pub- lie has not yet come to realize the effect that those decisions are cer- tain to have. It is not that the con- struction which the court has put up- on the act is different from that which most members of the profession, and most subordinate courts, and indeed the Supreme Court itself, had before indicated as the proper construction of the statute: but it is that it is now finally settled, by two fully considered decisions in respect to two of the larg- est and most powerful of these com
 binations, what their i1legality con-
 sists in, and how they are to be treat
 ed, in view of the finding that they
 are illegal and do. violate the provi-
 sions of the so-called antitrust or
 Sherman Act
 Persons who do not understand the
 effect of these decisions and really do
 not understand the law have a great
 deal to say which is intended to lead the public to the belief that in some
 way or other the Supreme Court has
 emasculated the statute and prevent
 ed its operation against objectionable
 and injurious trade combinations and
 conspiracies. Nothing is further from
 the truth.
 When the statute was passed in 1890
 the expressions used in it to define it's
 object and what it was proposed there
 in to denounce as unlawful were not
 new, but they were sufficiently broad
 and indefinite to require judicial con-
 structiOn to settle their meaning. Con-
 gress was dealing with a subject mat
 ter in respect to which 1t may be as-
 stunned that the legislators themselves
 were not clear as to the exact linita-
 tions of the meaning of the words in
 the statute they were passing. They
 knew there was an evil which they
 hoped to restrain by the enactment of
 this law, and they relied upon the courts in their construction of the law
 to hedge about it's operation such re-
 striction as would prevent the statute
 from being so wide in it's application
 as to involve absurdity and the inn
 practicable. The early decisions un-
 der the law can not be said to have
 been fortunate. The decisions in what
 was known as the Sugar Trust case
 the Knight case-was really retro
 grade step and one which seemed to
 limit much the operation of the stat ute It encouraged the organization of
 combinations which the same court has since found violate, the statute.
 The case could not be effectively pre-
 sented to the court because the rec ord had not been properly made up, and the questions arising were treat ed in the opinion in such way as to give the impression that the oper- ation of the law would be more re- stricted, because of the limits of Fed era1 Jurisdiction. Indeed, some law officers of the Government did not hesitate to say that under this ,deci- sion there was little hope of reaching the evil aimed at through Federal ac- tion. It has required 20 years of lit igation to make the statute clear But now 1t is clear.
 I shall not attempt to give it. a close, lawyer-iike interpretation, but I think it is not departing from the declaration of the court to say Chat they find any contract in restraint of trade. made for the purpose of ex- cluding competition, controlling prices, or in whole, is contrary to the statute and is subject to injunction and in dictment under this statute in the Federal courts where it affects inter state trade.
 Now, I would like to ask MT. Bryan Or any of the other publicists, and jurists who have been denouncing this of the people and a usurpation of ju- dicial power to tell the public what particular contract Or restraint Of in- terstate trade he would condemn which would not be condemned with in this definition of the court. The difficulty with. the literal construc- tion of the statute is that it would denounce a great many minor or in- cidental restraints of trade, which made the statute ridiculous and weak ened it's effect and lent support to the criticisms and contemptuous treat ment of the statute by those who were opposed to its passage and enforce ment
 For instance. take the instance cit- ed by a Federal circuit judge in which he said that under the literal con- struction of the statute which must be enforced, if there were two per- sons doing a wagon-express business across State line and they united in partnership. the union in the partnership would be a restraint of interstate trade in violation of the statute. Such result is really a re- ductio ad absurdum, and no one who was in favor of making the statute effective for the purposes for which it was passed, and had any intelli- gent appreciation of what the statute was intended to accomplish and what it meant, would contend for such a construction. It is true that in one of the decisions of the Supreme Court there was a statement made that the term reasonable could not be intro duced into the statute because Con- gress had not put 1t there, but the very same court, and the very same judge, when a case arose presenting a restraint of trade that must be con demned as unlawful if a literal mean ing were to be given to the statute, said in so many words that it must be reasonably construed, and that it must not be held to include contracts that were merely incidental restraints of trade and were not made for that l purpose. In one of these cases a man owned some steanboats that did an interstate business On the Ohio Riv-| er He wished to sell out He did | sell out, and in the sale of the steam | boats he wished to sell the good will | of the line which he had been run | hing. Accordingly he stipulated that he would not himself engage in that | business between those same points | for a certain number of years. This was interstate business and his con- tract was in restraint of trade, but | the Supreme Court held that it was B mere incidental restraint, l. e., in- cldental to the sale of the good will, a1d so was not within the statute. This would have been the same at common law, where from time inn such a restraint as this has been held to be reasonable because limited to the necessity of preserving he good will which the vender was selling, and which but for such an agreement would be worth nothing.