nimous. Justices Holmes and Lurton
upheld the Alabama law, but the majority, in an opinion written by
Justice Hughes, declared the law in conflict with the Thirteenth
Amendment, which prohibits slavery or involuntary servitude, except as a
punishment for crime.

The significance of the decision is this--slavery has been outlawed by
our highest court, and one more legal barrier to the progress of the
black man has been removed.

The case of Loewe vs. Lawler, probably better known to the public as the
Danbury Hatters case, was decided by the Supreme Court in February,
1908, Chief Justice Fuller rendering the decision. The action was
brought originally in the United States Circuit Court for the District
of Connecticut and, after passing through the Circuit Court of Appeals,
reached the Supreme Court late in 1907.

[Illustration: Portrait.]
Photograph copyright by Clinedinst, Washington.
Chief Justice Melville W. Fuller.

The plaintiffs, who were manufacturers of hats, complained that the
defendants--members of the United Hatters of North America, an
organization which was a part of the American Federation of Labor--were
"engaged in a combined scheme and effort to force all manufacturers of
fur hats in the United States, including the plaintiffs, against their
will and their previous policy of carrying on their business, to
organize their workmen . . . into an organization of the said
combination known as The United Hatters of North America, or, as the
defendants and their confederates term it, to unionize their shops, with
the intent thereby to control the employment of labor in, and the
operation of, said factories . . . and to carry out such scheme, effort
and purpose by restraining and destroying the interstate trade and
commerce of such manufacturers by means of intimidation of, and threats
made to such manufacturers and their customers in the several States, of
boycotting them, their product and their customers . . . until . . . the
said manufacturers should yield to the demand to unionize their
factories."

These methods had been successfully employed before, as is evidenced by
the fact that seventy of the eighty-two manufacturers of fur hats had
been compelled to accept the conditions set forth by the American
Federation of Labor. The boycott against the Danbury, manufacturers
began in July, 1902, and was widened to include the wholesalers who
handled the goods of the Danbury concern, the dealers who bou