46
The Green Bag
in the other it found a railway to have unlawfully stifled competition by acquir ing 46 per cent of the stock of another great railway, a substantial amount of whose business, though a relatively small proportion, competed with that of the former road. The Court thus seems to have been borne onward by the momentum of the doctrine which it itself laid down in the Standard Oil and Tobacco cases, and also to reflect a con siderable part of the popular judgment on the question to what extent it may be advisable to maintain actual competition in the public interest. The Northern Securities decision, in which the Court was closely divided, had come to be accepted as settled law, and the Court so far acquiesced in the attitude of that decision as to hand down with absolute unanimity a railway decision slightly amplifying the doctrine of the earlier case. Under the inspiration of the example set by the Supreme Court in the reform of equity procedure, the project of the American Bar Association for the re form of common law procedure is being pressed earnestly by one of its com mittees upon the attention of Congress. Another committee is interesting itself in the success of another beneficial measure for which the Association stands sponsor, a statute increasing the salaries of federal judges. Evidence that American criminal procedure is equal to the demands of prompt and even justice has not been lacking in New York state, where the efficient conduct of the cases against Becker's four accomplices and of the case against Hyde won Justice Goff well merited praise. The protracted Ettor trial in Massachusetts, however, is a discourag ing episode, showing that our progress must needs be extremely slow. New York state, moreover, has little to boast of in_view of the miscarriage of justice
involved in the Patrick case, for whether Patrick was rightly or wrongly con victed of murder by the courts of his state, his pardon by Governor Dix showed that in either event justice had been defeated. The country as a whole exhibits no great interest in the reform of criminal law and procedure and in scientific methods of dealing with offenders, but the California Bar Association has just gone on record as in favor of indeter minate sentence and parole for first offenders. Retrogressive action has been taken in Arizona and Idaho, both of which have adopted the recall of judges, and the evil effects of the system of elective judges were shown in many of the state elections. In Chicago the failure of the Municipal Court ticket of the Chicago Bar Association led to an agitation for the election of judges on a separate ballot, without party designation, and there is some hope that the evils of the system may be mitigated by this expe dient. The courts of the country may soon find themselves forced to face new problems connected with the uprising of popular democracy, of which the latest important symptoms are the adop tion of woman suffrage constitutional amendments by four states, while the direct initiative has been adopted in Idaho. Interest has been shown in the subject of professional ethics, the Nevada Bar Association having adopted the canons of the American Bar Association, while the Rhode Island Bar Association has referred the drafting of a code to a committee. Personal Chief Justice Olson of the Chicago Municipal Court has received a salary increase of $2,500 a year by an ordi
