374
The Green Bag
ensued justify the inference that the intention existed to use the power of the
isolatedly viewed, we are not considering,
by which numbers of persons, whether
combination as a vantage ground to
manufacturers,
further monopolize the trade in tobacco by means of trade conflicts designed to
ployees, were required to bind them
injure others, either by driving com
petitors out of the business or compelling them to become parties to a combina tion-—a purpose whose execution was
illustrated by the plug war which ensued and its results; by the snufl‘ war which followed and its results and by the conflict which immediately followed the
entry of the combination into England and the division of the world's business by the two foreign contracts which
ensued; by the ever-present mani festation which is exhibited of a con scious wrongdoing; by the form in
stockholders.
or
em
selves, generally for long periods, not to compete in the future.
“Indeed, when the results of the un disputed proof which we have stated are fully apprehended, and the wrongful acts which they exhibit are considered, there comes inevitably to the mind the conviction that it was the danger which it was deemed would arise to individual liberty and the public wellbeing from acts
like those which this record exhibits which led the legislative mind to con ceive and to enact the Anti-Trust act, considerations which also serve to so clearly demonstrate that the combina
the various transactions were
tion here assailed is within the law
embodied from the beginning, ever changing but ever in substance the
as to leave no doubt that it is our plain
which
same, now the organization of a new
company, now the control exerted by the taking of stock in one or another
duty to apply its prohibitions." The Court thus devoted some atten
or in several, so as to obscure the result actually attained, nevertheless uniform,
tion to the subject of trade wars, efi dently treating them as an improper and illegal method of acquiring the monopoly of a business, and took
in their manifestations of the purpose
occasion to condemn methods “ruth
to restrain others and to monopolize
lessly carried out upon the assumption that to work upon the fears or play upon the cupidity of competitors would make success possible."
and retain power in the hands of the few who, it would seem, from the beginning contemplated the mastery of the trade which practically followed;
by the gradual absorption of control over all the elements essential to the successful manufacture of tobacco pro
ducts, and placing such control in the hands of seemingly independent cor
porations, serving as perpetual barriers to the entry of others into the tobacco
trade; by persistent expenditure of millions upon millions of dollars in buying out plants, not for the purpose of utilizing them, but in order to close them up and render them useless for the purposes of trade; by the constantly recurring stipulations, whose legality,
The reasoning of this decision, much more clearly than that of the Standard Oil
judgment,
makes
it
reasonably
evident and probable, not to say certain, that a monopoly which has been built up by the normal methods of free com petition, without any intimidation of competitors by price-cutting or threats to ruin their business and without any acquisition of control by appeals to their greed for excessive capitalization and profits, is outside the prohibitions of the Sherman Act. This decision has thus tended to remove much of the vague ness of the general prohibition of “ab