n that it could so yield, without stultifying itself hopelessly
before the legal profession and the public. In striving to reach this
position, however, I apprehend that the Chief Justice, unreservedly,
crossed the chasm on whose brink American jurists had been shuddering
for ninety years. The task the Chief Justice assumed was difficult
almost beyond precedent. He proposed to surrender to the vested
interests the principle of _reasonableness_ which they demanded, and
which the tribunal he represented, together with Congress, had refused
to surrender for fifteen years. To pacify the public, which would
certainly resent this surrender, he was prepared to punish two hated
corporations, while he strove to preserve, so far as he could, the
respect of the legal profession and of the public, for the court over
which he presided, by maintaining a semblance of consistency.

To accomplish these contradictory results, the Chief Justice began,
rather after the manner of Marshall in Marbury _v_. Madison, by an
extra-judicial disquisition. The object of this disquisition was to
justify his admission of the evidence of reasonableness as a defence,
although it was not needful to decide that such evidence must be
admitted in order to dispose of that particular cause. For the Chief
Justice very readily agreed that the Standard Oil Company was, in fact,
an unreasonable restraint of trade, and must be dissolved, no matter
whether it were allowed to prove its reasonable methods or not.
Accordingly, he might have contented himself with stating that,
admitting for the sake of argument but without approving, all the
defendant advanced, he should sustain the government; but to have so
disposed of the case would not have suited his purpose. What the Chief
Justice had it at heart to do was to surrender a fundamental principle,
and yet to appear to make no surrender at all. Hence, he prepared his
preliminary and extra-judicial essay on the human reason, of whose
precise meaning, I must admit, I still, after many perusals, have grave
doubts. I sometimes suspect that the Chief Justice did not wish to be
too explicit. So far as I comprehend the Chief Justice, his chain of
reasoning amounted to something like this: It was true, he observed,
that for fifteen years the Supreme Court had rejected the evidence of
reasonableness which he admitted, and had insisted upon a general
principle which he might be supposed to renounce, but this apparent
discrepan