to monopolize, any part
of the trade or commerce among the several States, or with foreign
nations, shall be deemed guilty under this act." And in the third
section: "Every person who shall make any such contract, or engage
in any such combination or conspiracy, shall be deemed guilty of a
misdemeanor." The rest of the legislation provides penalties, manner,
and machinery for the enforcement of these laws by prosecuting
attorneys, etc., with a usual allowance to informants; and it may be
here noted that one great trouble has resulted from this machinery,
for it provided injunction remedies and dissolution, which may well
be too severe a penalty, and, furthermore, dispenses with a jury and
throws unnecessarily upon the court--even now, as in the Standard Oil
case, a distant high court of appeal--the burden of determining a
complicated and voluminous mass of fact. Our ancestors never would
have suffered such matters to be adjudged by the Chancellor!

South Dakota has an extraordinary statute making the agents for
agricultural implements, etc., guilty of a criminal offence when their
principals refuse to sell at wholesale prices to dealers in the State
(S.D., 1890, 154, 2). But beside these remedies, there is a frequent
statute dating from the earliest Kansas act of 1889, that debts for
goods sold by a so-called trust, contracts made in violation of
the law, will not be enforced in favor of the offending person or
corporation. That is to say, the person buying the goods of a trust
may simply refuse to pay for them; and the constitutionality of this
legislation has recently been sustained by a divided opinion in the
Supreme Court of the United States.[1] The possession or ownership
of trust certificates is in some States made criminal. Corporations
offending against the statute are to have their charters taken away,
or, if chartered in other States, to be expelled from the State. All
contracts or agreements in violation of any of these statutes are, of
course, made void.

[Footnote 1: Continental Wall Paper Co. _v_. Voight, 212 U.S. 227.]

There are special statutes in Kansas, Nebraska, and North Dakota
against trusts in certain lines of business, as, for instance, the
buying or selling of live-stock or grain of any kind.

In the twenty years that have elapsed since this early legislation
there has been considerable clarifying in the legislative mind; modern
statutes, and especially constitutional provisions, stating t