hastily drafted, and more hastily crowded through the legislatures of twenty or more states, under all sorts of partisan pressure, with the practical result, speaking generally, of declaring, in the United States, at the end of the nineteenth century, the common law of England of the fifteenth, sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. These statutes, taking a general view of their intendment, declare the law as the English judges of more than an hundred years ago expounded it, with little or no regard to the changed conditions of business since that time. They write the dogmas of the pre-Revolutionary period into our statute law of today. This was not, perhaps, an altogether unnatural result of the widespread interest and attention that "trusts" created in the subject. Perhaps everyone of these statutes—including the federal act of July 2, 1890, known as the Sherman Law—is open fairly and honestly to the same criticism, viz., that they seek to crystallize into statutes doctrines of public policy which are obsolete or obsolescent, if not wholly outgrown and outworn. Nothing, as was suggested above, is easier than to generalize in a sweeping fashion about the evils of monopoly and the blessings of competition. A legislator can do a very large business in that line on a very small capital, and there is a good deal of excuse, we must admit, for the activity which, even in hard times has been displayed in that business.
Englishmen—and by Englishmen we must include ourselves as of the Anglo-Saxon stock—have always had what they have hugged to their hearts as a wholesome dread of monopoly. No Englishman ever knew, and no one of us can ever know, exactly what "monopoly" in this precious phrase means; but that it means something to be dreaded, no really sound Englishman ever doubted. It is a sort of bogey that has served to scare an hundred generations of us. So also, as of course, very much of the recent agitation which has arisen over monopoly, and which has provoked for the past six or eight years a flood of legislation and litigation in the United States in restraint of trade, is the outcropping of the grudge which the "have nots" always have against the "haves." It gave the politicians a chance, of which
