estion whether the Sherman law was of any real efficacy in preventing
the evils that arose from unregulated combination in business. A
decision of the United States Supreme Court, rendered in 1895 in the
so-called Knight case, against the American Sugar Refining Company, had,
in the general belief, taken the teeth out of the Sherman law. In the
words of Mr. Taft, "The effect of the decision in the Knight case upon
the popular mind, and indeed upon Congress as well, was to discourage
hope that the statute could be used to accomplish its manifest purpose
and curb the great industrial trusts which, by the acquisition of all
or a large percentage of the plants engaged in the manufacture of a
commodity, by the dismantling of some and regulating the output of
others, were making every effort to restrict production, control prices,
and monopolize the business." It was obviously necessary that the
Sherman act, unless it were to pass into innocuous desuetude, should
have the original vigor intended by Congress restored to it by a new
interpretation of the law on the part of the Supreme Court. Fortunately
an opportunity for such a change presented itself with promptness.
A small group of powerful financiers had arranged to take control of
practically the entire system of railways in the Northwest, "possibly,"
Roosevelt has said, "as the first step toward controlling the entire
railway system of the country." They had brought this about by
organizing the Northern Securities Company to hold the majority of the
stock of two competing railways, the Great Northern and the Northern
Pacific. At the direction of President Roosevelt, suit was brought
by the Government to prevent the merger. The defendants relied for
protection upon the immunity afforded by the decision in the Knight
case. But the Supreme Court now took more advanced ground, decreed that
the Northern Securities Company was an illegal combination, and ordered
its dissolution.

By the successful prosecution of this case the Sherman act was made once
more a potentially valuable instrument for the prevention of the more
flagrant evils that flow from "combinations in restraint of trade."
During the remaining years of the Roosevelt Administrations, this legal
instrument was used with aggressive force for the purpose for which it
was intended. In seven years and a half, forty-four prosecutions were
brought under it by the Government, as compared with eighteen in the
preceding ele