fully applied
as against an industrial combination for the first time. The agreements
in the case, the parties to which were manufacturing concerns, effected
a division of territory among them, and so involved, it was held, a
"direct" restraint on the distribution and hence of the transportation
of the products of the contracting firms. The holding, however, did not
question the doctrine of the earlier case, which in fact continued
substantially undisturbed until 1905, when Swift and Co. _v._ United
States,[424] was decided.

THE "CURRENT OF COMMERCE" CONCEPT: THE SWIFT CASE

Defendants in the Swift case were some thirty firms engaged in Chicago
and other cities in the business of buying livestock in their
stockyards, in converting it at their packing houses into fresh meat,
and in the sale and shipment of such fresh meat to purchasers in other
States. The charge against them was that they had entered into a
combination to refrain from bidding against each other in the local
markets, to fix the prices at which they would sell, to restrict
shipments of meat, and to do other forbidden acts. The case was appealed
to the Supreme Court on defendants' contention that certain of the acts
complained of were not acts of interstate commerce and so did not fall
within a valid reading of the Sherman Act. The Court, however, sustained
the Government on the ground that the "scheme as a whole" came within
the act, and that the local activities alleged were simply part and
parcel of this general scheme.[425]

Referring to the purchases of livestock at the stockyards, the Court,
speaking by Justice Holmes, said: "Commerce among the States is not a
technical legal conception, but a practical one, drawn from the course
of business. When cattle are sent for sale from a place in one State,
with the expectation that they will end their transit, after purchase,
in another, and when in effect they do so, with only the interruption
necessary to find a purchaser at the stockyards, and when this is a
typical, constantly recurring course, the current thus existing is a
current of commerce among the States, and the purchase of the cattle is
a part and incident of such commerce."[426] Likewise the sales alleged
of fresh meat at the slaughtering places fell within the general design.
Even if they imported a technical passing of title at the slaughtering
places, they also imported that the sales were to persons in other
States, and that shipments