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The Standard Oil Decision course be much less than that existing
it must naturally come about in the
before the decision was rendered, and the
course of time that, if it remains upon our statute books, its purport will gradually be modified by judicial in terpretation. But the Supreme Court cannot be reproached for its present attitude toward this statute. While it is true that the Court might have adopted a more liberal construction in
legitimate business of the country may well have experienced a sense of com parative relief. Such uneasiness as will continue to exist will come from the vagueness of the doctrine enun ciated rather than from any radical interpretation of the law. If the letter of the statute continues unchanged, much will depend upon the policy of the Administration. A “trust-busting" radical Administration can still find plenty of opportunity for prosecutions of corporations perilously near the border line of legitimate business but not clearly outside its bounds. The future course of judicial decision, how ever, cannot fail to remove much of the vagueness to which we refer,
and more specific definitions of the wrongdoing
involved
in
abnormal
and unusual methods of suppressing competition will doubtless be forth coming. The decision, because of its very
the earlier cases arising under it, and the
orderly development of this branch of the law would have been accelerated
by such a procedure, still the decision in the present case, following the line of precedents which the Court had to consider, could not well have been dis similar from that announced.
The Court must defer to public opinion, and the public opinion of today, if not the enlightened public opinion, seems to favor the extirpation of mo nopoly. It is difficult to lay this down as an incontestable fact, since public opinion is so variable, and new solutions of public questions have of late years
been so rapidly popularized.
It is
caution, can hardly satisfy partisans
safe, however, to assert that the trend
of the radical school, but whatever objection is raised, the objection that
of the times is in the direction of the regulation rather than the suppression
it shows an attempt to frustrate the will imaginable. The effect of the decision is to give the term “monopoly" a very
of monopoly, and toward the prohibition not of the mere fact of combination but of business practices injurious to the public welfare which are found
broad scope, so as to embrace all the
closely associated with monopoly.
offenses which Congress can intelligently be supposed to have had in view. In
soon as we have an adequate system of regulation of monopoly, and adequate
fact not only does the Court free itself
legislation preserving the rights of free dom of competition and prohibiting unfair trade in the broadest sense of
of Congress is of the flimsiest sort
from any suspicion of a desire to inno vate upon the statute, but it actually goes a long way toward perfunctorily and uncritically sustaining the legisla tive policy of extirpation of monopoly. As to this point, however, it is Congress and not the Supreme Court which is to be found fault with. The Sherman law
As
the word, the Sherman act will have outgrown its usefulness.
The futility of seeking to maintain freedom of competition by legislative
and judicial action, when the forces of society are actively at work to unite
was actually based upon an economic
rather than dissociate our large in
theory which is being outgrown, and
dustrial
plants,
must
become
more
