Page:Earle, Liberty to Trade as Buttressed by National Law, 1909 78.jpg

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attempting to set boundaries to the tides." Which is just the view contended for! To combine to add all the benefits of cooperation to all of those safeguarded by competition, cannot, possibly, be a public evil; but nevertheless the courts have a right and duty to, and do, in the first instance examine each such case critically. The remarks on this decision in the Addyston case should remove all further misunderstanding of it.

Perhaps, after all, it is fortunate that the Supreme Court refused to examine it or the common law critically in the two cases under consideration. For by so doing it has given the common law the tremendous added sanction afforded by like results reached by the independent reasonings of powerful minds. The dissent in those cases is quite as interesting as the prevailing opinions, as it but fortifies the right conclusion.

Mr. Justice White most ably argues along the lines of Mr Justice Jackson—that contracts that reasonably restrained were not contracts properly called contracts in restraint at all; and so were not within the act; but the fallacy of this seems to be in the fact that every contract that really restrained trade itself (and not merely the conduct of a trader that trade might be encouraged by honest dealing) was held to be unreasonable and unlawful, so that "reasonable restraints" were restraints that did not restrain at all, and only "reasonable" because they did not restrain! But it was not the common law, nor is it "reasonable" to say that a restraint is not a restraint because it is a reasonable restraint, while it is both to say "we shall look at substance not names, and if we find a thing is an encouragement

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