was fixed by freemen in a free market. Excessive price has thus, again and again, been defined for centuries. Excessive price is, and always has been, a price arrived at by some illegal method, and not by free competition, its only real cure.
Again, in the Tobacco case,[1] it is pointed out that the remedial purpose which the Act contemplated was to prevent the destruction of liberty of contract and all substantial right to trade and not to cause "the Act to be at war with itself by annihilating the fundamental right of freedom to trade, which, on the very face of the Act, it was enacted to preserve."
Again there could be no more forcible statement that the law (unless repealed by the Lever Act because of its three words, "unjust," "excessive" and "unreasonable"), still is, according to centuries of Common Law and all our prior statutory law, that competition is not only "the life of trade," but also "the mother of cheapness." That freedom, if preserved by law against monopolistic restraint, is the best and, indeed, the only safeguard! It is difficult to understand how anyone familiar with the subject and the decisions, can reasonably think that three perfectly familiar words, that have had a legal meaning for centuries to the contrary, are sufficient to set at naught all the work of great lawyers and economic thinkers. The cases are numerous that when words in a certain connection, in statute or in law, are given a constant meaning, it takes demonstration to the contrary not to so understand them in a subsequent statute. In addition, this change of interpretation if constitutional, would cause the greatest confusion in fixing the measure of damages in all civil suits, in all accountings of
- ↑ United States vs. American Tobacco Company, 221 U. S. 106 (at page 180). 1911.
