y_ at law can be punished
criminally, or will give rise to civil suits for damages by the
parties injured, or usually entitle one to the protection of an
injunction. A conspiracy, therefore, is not only a guilty combination,
of two or more persons, for an unlawful end by any means, or for a
lawful end by unlawful means, but also one for an immoral end, a
malicious end, as, let us say, the ruin of a third person, or the
injury of the public. All the dispute about the law of conspiracy and
the statutes and what laborers can do and what employers can do to-day
really hinges about that last clause. The labor leaders, the radicals,
want to say that nothing shall be a conspiracy where the end is
not unlawful and where the acts done are such as, if done by an
individual, would not be wrong. In other words, they want statutes
to provide that nothing is a conspiracy where the acts done are
in themselves lawful if done by one individual. But this English
conspiracy law was of the most immense sociological value, in that it
did recognize the tremendous power of _combination_. It said, although
you don't have to trade with Smith alone, yet a combination of a
great many individuals for the purpose of ruining Smith, by all
simultaneously refusing to trade with him, is such a tremendous injury
to Smith that the law will take cognizance of it and hold that kind of
a combination to be unlawful.

This definition should be further extended, perhaps, to remind you
that the courts hold that there are certain kinds of combinations,
contemplating ends which will necessarily result in the use of
unlawful means; the most familiar example is picketing. The courts
mostly hold that although in theory a labor union can march up and
down the highway and peacefully advise non-union men or other laborers
not to take their jobs, in practice such action usually, if not
necessarily, goes to the point of intimidation; and intimidation is
nearly always made unlawful by statute. Now I should only add that
it is very important to remember--and even the courts do not always
remember it--that the thing being punished as a conspiracy is not the
end, but the combining; the conspiracy itself is the criminal act.
Suppose in Pennsylvania one thousand men meet and say: "John Smith
has taken a job and is a scab, and we will go around and maul him
to-night," and they do, or they don't; if they are tried, the fact
whether they did maul him or not has nothing to do wit