had taken on this sacred hue solely because for centuries they had never before been abused? Is there any other logical or sensible explanation? But a man has no unlimited right to sell poisons, and it can make no difference whether the poison was to kill men or kill that trade upon which their lives, comfort, and happiness so largely depend. The truth is, that the trusts have placed what was an unmixed agency for good among the most dangerous instruments of evil, and the courts have ultimately become conscious of the change; and that is the sole difference in the Knight and Securities cases.
It must never be forgotten that "when the acts consist of making a combination calculated to cause temporal damage, the power to punish such acts, when done maliciously, cannot be denied, because they are to be followed and worked out by conduct which might have been lawful if not preceded by the acts. No conduct has such an absolute privilege as to justify all possible schemes of which it may be a part. The most innocent and constitutionally protected of acts or omissions may be made a step in a criminal plot, and if it is a step in a plot neither its innocence nor the Constitution is sufficient to prevent the punishment of the plot by law."[1] That sales for immoral or illegal uses are illegal has long been settled.[2]
Such an attempt as this, made by one long withdrawn from practice, and accomplished during a single day's vacation, must necessarily be crude, fragmentary and incomplete. But believing that the common law
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