usiness of the constituent corporations
or persons. The modern question, therefore, has become really the
question of the large corporation, its regulation and its control;
further complicated, of course, by the fact that hitherto there has
been no power to control such large corporations except the very State
which creates them, which is usually quite indifferent to their acts
so long as they pay the corporation tax. It is therefore a question
not only of the large corporation, but of the powers of the States
over each other's corporations and of the Federal government over all.
Until the Northern Securities case, it was probably supposed that a
corporation, being an individual, could not be guilty of a criminal
conspiracy, and consequently could not in itself offend against the
anti-trust acts. That case, and more recent decisions still, show a
disposition of the courts to look behind the screen of the fictitious
entity of the corporation to the merits and demerits of the persons
making it up, and the objects with which they came together and the
methods they continued to use.

The Federal statute was indeed necessary to this extent, that,
although the common law was unquestioned, as there is no Federal
common law in the absence of statute, and as interstate commerce
cannot be controlled by State law, either common or statute, it was
necessary for Congress to declare that the principles of the common
law should apply to interstate commerce. It was also doubtless wise to
remind the public of the existence of this body of law and to affix
definite prohibitions and penalties. To this extent the anti-trust
legislation, both State and Federal, is fully justified. Nevertheless,
it is noteworthy that the older States, where both the legislatures
and the bar had presumably a higher degree of legal education, rarely
found it necessary to enact statutes against trusts. There has
never been, for instance, any anti-trust law in Massachusetts or in
Pennsylvania, or for a long time in New York, for the first statute
of that State against trusts was made intentionally futile by being
applied only to a trust which secured a complete--_i.e._, one hundred
per cent.--monopoly of its trade.

The economic consideration of all such legislation we do not propose
to consider; whether it was wise to forbid all forestalling, for
instance--which at the common law meant buying at a definite distance
as well as at a distant time; that is to say