th the views of the community. The statute books of every
State are encumbered with laws passed in moments of hysteria and never
put into operation, or else allowed to lapse after a few months of
confusion. Every newspaper in California, for example, breaks the law
every day when it prints a news item without appending the name of the
writer, and probably we are all of us breaking laws of which we never
heard. This sort of thing brings a law into contempt and robs it of the
sacredness that should attach to it. The Sherman anti-trust law, for
example, would bring the whole business of the country to a standstill
if it were strictly enforced, and I believe it is not good to bring
large and innocent sections of the community within the scope of a
criminal law simply for the purpose of reaching a minute proportion
whose methods are flagrantly bad. If the Sherman anti-trust law were
enforced, it would have to be repealed at once, and I think honest
traders have a right to complain of a law that makes them technical
criminals and is enforced only against notorious wrongdoers. The law
should be so framed as to reach only wrongdoers and to leave honest
traders outside of even its technical scope.

President Roosevelt was emphatic in his declaration that he intended to
enforce the Sherman anti-trust act, and during the four years beginning
with 1902 his administration was active in that direction.

In 1906 he stated: "Combinations of capital, like combinations of labor,
are a necessary element in our present industrial system. It is not
possible completely to prevent them; and, if it were possible, such
complete prevention would do damage to the body politic. It is
unfortunate that our present laws should forbid all combinations,
instead of sharply discriminating between those combinations which do
good and those combinations which do evil.

It is a public evil to have on the statute-books a law incapable of
full enforcement, because both judges and juries realize that its full
enforcement would destroy the business of the country; for the result is
to make decent men violators of the law against their will and to put a
premium on the behavior of the willful wrongdoers. Such a result, in
turn, tends to throw the decent man and willful wrongdoer into close
association, and in the end to drag down the former to the latter's
level; for the man who becomes a law-breaker in one way unhappily tends
to lose all respect for law and to