dent Taft's
recent message, at least as to railroad companies not holding half of
such stock.

It will well repay us now to make a careful study of all these
anti-trust statutes, for the purpose of seeing whether they have
introduced any new principles into the law, and also in what manner
they express the old. Up to two or three years ago one might have said
that not a single case had been decided in the courts of any State or
of the Federal government against trusts or combinations, which might
not have been decided the same way under common-law principles had
there been no anti-trust legislation whatever. As is well known, the
great exception to this statement is the interpretation of the Federal
Act by the Supreme Court of the United States, declaring that any
contract in restraint of trade was unlawful under it, although it
would have been reasonable and proper at the common law. Later
indications are, as President Taft has said, that the courts will see
a way to modify this somewhat extravagant position by reintroducing
the common-law test, viz.: Whether the contract is done with the
_purport_ (or effect) of making a monopoly for destroying competition,
or whether such result is trivial and incidental to a reasonable and
lawful business arrangement. The earliest statutes, those of Michigan,
Kansas, and Nebraska, in 1889, denounce the following principles:
"All contracts, agreements, understandings, and combinations ... the
_purpose_ or object of which shall be to limit or control the output,
to enhance or regulate the price, to prevent or restrict free
competition in production or sale." This, the Michigan statute, merely
states the common law, but goes on to declare such contract, etc., a
criminal conspiracy, and any act done as part thereof, a misdemeanor,
and, in the case of a corporation, subjects it to forfeiture of its
charter. The law makes the exception, nearly universal in the Southern
and Western States, that this anti-trust legislation shall not apply
to agricultural products, live stock in the hands of the producer, nor
to the services of laborers or artisans who are formed into societies
or trades-unions--an exception which, of course, makes it
class legislation, and has caused the whole law to be declared
unconstitutional, so far as I know, by the highest court of every
State where it has been drawn in question, and under the Fourteenth
Amendment also by the Supreme Court of the United States; and i