* * * All commercial men with capital are acquainted with the ordinary expedient of sowing one year a crop of apparently unfruitful prices; * * * and until the present argument at the Bar, it may be doubted whether * * * merchants were ever deemed to be bound by law to conform to some imaginary 'normal' standard of freights or prices, or that Law Courts had a right to say to them in respect of their competitive tariffs, 'Thus far shalt thou go and no further. * * * I myself should deem it to be a misfortune if we were to attempt to prescribe to the business world how honest and peacable trade was to be carried on in a case where no such illegal elements as I have mentioned exist, or were to adopt some standard of judicial 'reasonableness,' or of 'normal' prices, or 'fair freights,' to which commercial adventurers, otherwise innocent, were bound to conform."
Mr. Justice McKenna, in the often followed opinion delivered in the National Cotton Oil case, well says:[1] Its (monopoly's) dominant thought now is, to quote another, 'the notion of exclusiveness or 'unity'; in other words, the suppression of competition by the unification of interest or management, or, it may be, through agreement and concert of action. And the purpose is so definitely the control of prices that monopoly has been defined to be 'unified tactics with regard to prices.' It is the power to control prices which makes the inducement of combinations and their profit. It is such power that makes it the concern of the law to prohibit or limit them. And this concern and the policy based upon it * * * has expression * * * in a well-known national
- ↑ National Cotton Oil vs. Texas, 197 U. S. 115 (see page 129). 1905.
