Chapter V: Front Matter (5)

As hot weather came on, I used to pack a hammock and reading and writing and cooking things on a donkey nearly every day, and drop down through the filberts to my cypresses. There was fairly decent bathing there, over an outrageous bottom of stones and sea-urchins. What I liked best, though, was simply to lie around and watch the world go by. Not that much of it does go by the Gulf of Nicomedia. If it hadn't been for a sail every now and then, you would have supposed that people had forgotten all about that little blue pocket of a firth leading nowhere between its antique hills. Then there were two or three trains a day, whose black you could just make out, crawling through the green of the opposite shore. And there was a steamer a day each way that it was as much as your life was worth to put your foot into. You wouldn't think so, though, to see the people who packed the decks. Sometimes I used to go down to the landing for the pleasure of the contrast they made, solemnly huddled up in their picturesque rags, with the noisy modern steamer. It was a miracle where so many of them came from and went to. That's the wildest part of the Marmora, you know, for all their railroad on the north shore. Some day, I suppose, when German expresses go thundering through to the Persian Gulf, it'll be all factory chimneys and summer hotels, like the rest of the world. But now there's nothing worse than vineyards and tobacco plantations. On the south coast there's hardly that. The hills stand up pretty straight out of the water, and they're wooded down to the rocks. You might think it virgin forest if you didn't know the Nicene Creed came out of it--to say nothing of invisible villages, and eyes looking out at you without your knowing. It all gave one such an idea of the extraordinary wreckage that has been left on the shores of that old Greek Sea. Only you don't get it as you do here, where races and creeds march past you on the Bridge while you stand by and admire. There's something more secret and ancient about it--more like Homer and the Bible and the Arabian Nights.

The caravans gave the most telling touch. You don't often see camels up here any longer, but they're still common enough in the interior. I could hardly believe my eyes the first time a procession of them appeared on my beach. First came a man on horseback, with a couple of Persian saddle-bags to make your mouth water, and then the long string of camels roped together like barges in a tow. What an air they had--the fantastic tawny line of them swinging against the blue of the Gulf! And how softly they padded along the shingle, with the picturesque ruffians in charge of them throned high among their mysterious bales! They passed without so much as a turn of the eye, my Wise Men of the East, and disappeared behind the point as silently as they came. It gave me the strangest sensation. I had felt something of the same before. I could scarcely help it, looking out between those tragic trees at the white strip of beach and the blue strip of sea and the green strip of hills that were so much like other hills and seas and beaches and yet so different. But there had never come to me before quite such a sense of the strangeness of this world where so many things had been buried from the time of Jason and the Argo--of this world of which I knew nothing and to which I was nothing.

You may believe that I was delighted when I went back to the village that night and found it full of camels. The air was sizzling with bonfires and _kebabs_--you know those bits of lamb they broil on a long wooden spit?--and strange faces were at every corner. They filled the coffee-house, too, when I finally got there. By that time it was too dark to stare as hard as I would have liked. But perhaps the scene was all the more picturesque for the shadowy figures scattered under the vine in the dusk, and the bubble of nargilehs filling the intervals of talk. A feature would come saliently out here and there in the red of a cigarette--a shining eye, a hawk nose, a bronzed cheek-bone. And out on the _meidan_ were groups around fires, with their little pipes that have all the trouble of the East in them, and their little tomtoms of such inimitable rhythms.

I found my friends established as usual in the seat of honor--an old sofa in the corner of the café--and as usual they made place for me amongst them. When the ceremony of their welcome subsided, the _Mudir_ took occasion to whisper to me that the leader of the caravan, an excellent fellow who had stopped there before, was telling stories. I then recognized, in the light of the _cafedij's_ lamp, the man I had seen that afternoon on horseback. He sat on a stool in front of the divan of honor, and behind him were crowded all the other stools and mats in the place. Although he had not deigned, before, to turn his head toward me, he now testified by the depth of his salaam to the honor he felt in such an addition to his circle. He was a curiously handsome chap, burnt and bearded, with the high-hung jaw of his people, the arched brow, the almost Roman nose. And, shaky as I still was in the language, he didn't leave me long to wonder why he was the center of the circle. He was a born _raconteur_--one of those story-tellers who in the East still carry on the tradition of the troubadours. Not that he sang to us, or recited poetry--although the _Imam_ told me with pride that the man was a dictionary of the Persian poets. But he went on with a story he had begun before my entrance. It was one of those endless old eastern tales that are such a charming mixture of serpent wisdom and childish _naïveté_. And he told it with a vividness of gesture and inflection that you never get from print.

Well, you can imagine! I always had a fancy for that sort of thing, but it's so deuced hard to get at--at least, for people like us. And after that queer turn the first sight of the caravan gave me, down by the water, it made me feel as if I were really beginning to lay my hand on things at last. So I was disappointed enough when at the end of the story the party began to break up. Upon my signifying as much to my neighbor, the _Mudir_, however, he said that nothing would be easier than to summon the man to a private session. If I would do him the honor to come to the _konak_--I was tickled enough to take up with the idea, provided the meeting should take place at my house instead. I knew there would be bakshish, which I didn't like to put the _Mudir_ in for, after all he had done. Moreover, I had a whim to get the camel-driver under my own roof--by way of nailing the East, so to speak!

So the upshot of the business was that we made a night of it. Oh, I don't mean any of your wild and woolly ones. To be sure, we did wet things down a trifle more than is the custom of the country. There happened to be a decanter on the table, which the camel-driver looked at as if he wouldn't mind knowing what it contained; and being a bit awkward at first, I knew no better than to trot it out. The _Mudir_, to whom of course I offered it first, wouldn't have any. I suppose he had his reputation to keep up before an inferior. I was rather surprised, all the same, for it was plain enough that the camel-driver was by no means the kind of man the name implies, and a little Greek wine wouldn't hurt a baby. Moreover, I had heard of this _raki_ of theirs, which is so much fire-water, and I didn't take their temperance very seriously. As for the camel-driver, he was rather amusing.

"You tempt me to my death!" he laughed, taking the glass I poured out for him. "Do you know that my men would kill me if they saw me now? These country people have not the ideas of the _effendi_ and myself. They follow blindly the Prophet, not realizing how many rooms there are in the house of a wise man. They found out that I had been affording opportunity for the forgiveness of God, and they took it quite seriously. They threatened to kill me if I did not make a public confession. And I had to do it, to please them. On the next Friday I made a solemn confession of my sins in mosque, and swore never to smell another drop."

At this I didn't know just what to do. I looked at the _Mudir_, and the _Mudir_ looked at the camel-driver. The latter, however, waved his hand with a smile of goodfellowship.

"There is no harm now," he said. "We break caravan to-morrow at Nicomedia. Moreover, I do not drink saying it is right. I should blaspheme God, who has commanded me not to drink. But I acknowledge that I sin. Great be the name of God!" With which he tipped the glass into his mouth. "My soul!" he exclaimed, "That is better than a cucumber in August!"

These people are democratic, you know, to a degree of which we haven't an idea--for all our declaration of independence. Yet there are certain invisible lines which are sure to trip a foreigner up and which made me mighty uncertain what to do with the governor of a _mudirlik_ and the leader of a caravan. But the latter proceeded to look out for that. Such a jolly good fellow you never saw in your life, with his stories, and the way he had with him, and the things he had been up to. It turned out that he knew western Asia a good deal better than I know western Europe. Tabriz, Tashkend, Samarkand, Cabul, to say nothing of Mecca and Cairo and Tripoli--such names dropped from him as Liverpool and Marseilles might from me. Where camel goes he had been, and for him Asia Minor was no more than a sort of ironic tongue stuck out at Europe by the huge continent behind. It gave me my first inkling of how this empire is tied up. It seems to hang so loosely together, without the rails and wires that put Sitka and St. Augustine in easier reach of each other than Constantinople and Bagdad. I began to learn then that wires and rails are not everything--that there are stronger nets than those. Altogether it was a momentous occasion. To sit there in that queer old house, in a wild hill village of the Marmora, and speak familiarly with that camel-driver who carried the secrets of Asia in his pocket--it brought me nearer than I had ever dreamed to that life which was always so tantalizing me by my inability to get at it.

When the man finally withdrew, and the _Mudir_ after him, I was in no mood to go to bed. They had opened to me their ancient world, with all its poetry and mystery, and I did not want to lose it again. I could see it stretching dimly beyond the windows where the water-wheels went moaning under the moon. I went out into it. The night was--you have no idea what those nights could be. They had such a way of swallowing up the squalidness of things, and bringing out all their melancholy magic. The rose season was at its height, and the air was one perfume from the hidden gardens. Then the nightingales were at that heart-breaking music of theirs. And the moon! It wasn't one of those glaring round things, like a coachman's button or a butcher's boy with the mumps, by which young ladies are commonly put into spasms; but it was an old wasted one, with such a light!

It was all the more extraordinary because not a creature was about--except a man who lay asleep on the ground, not far from the door. Apparently they dropped off wherever they happened to be, down there, and I used to envy them for it. I stood still for a while, in the shadow of the house, taking it all in. Don't you know, it happens once in a while that you have a mood, and that your surroundings come up to it? It doesn't happen very often, either--at least, to workaday people like us. So I stood there, looking and listening and breathing. And when I saw the edge of the shadow of the house crumble up at one place, without any visible cause, and creep out into the moonlight, I--I only looked at it. Nothing had any visible cause in that strange world of mine, and I watched the slowly lengthening finger of shadow with the passivity of a man who has seen too many wonders to wonder any more. But then I made out a darker darkness winding back toward the house. And--I don't know--I thought of the man on the ground. I looked at him.

It was my camel-driver, dead as Darius, with the blood running out of a hole in his back like water out of a spout. For the moment I was still too far away from every day to be startled, or even very much surprised. It was only a part of that mysterious world, with its mysterious people and mysterious ways that I never could understand. What was he doing there dead, who had been so full of life a little while before? Was it one of his jokes? The night was the most enchanting you could imagine, the air was heady with the breath of rose-gardens, the nightingales were singing in the trees (down in the valley I heard, low, low, the weary water-wheels), and here was the prince of story-tellers with his tongue stopped forever, and the blood of him making a snaky black trail across the moonlight....

* * * * *

What happened next? My dear fellow, you remind me of these kids who will never let you finish their story! Nothing happened next. That was the beauty of it. I guess I got one pretty good case of the jim-jams after a while, and when I got through wondering whether I was going to be elected next, I began to wonder whether they wouldn't think I'd done it. Of course, I had done it, as a matter of fact, and that didn't tend to composure of mind. Neither did my speculations as to what the _Mudir_ might or might not have noticed when he left me that evening. But, if you will believe it, nobody ever lifted a finger. The next morning the caravan was gone and apparently everything was the same as before. If anything, they were more decent than before. That was the worst of it. I don't believe I'd have minded so much if they'd stoned me and ridden me out on a rail and set the Government after me and raised the devil generally. I should at least have felt less at sea. As it was--hello, there's Carmignani! Let's take him over to Tokatlian's.

THE UNREMEMBERED

FRAGMENTS OF A LOST MEMORY

BY FLORENCE WILKINSON

Where have they gone, the unremembered things,
The hours, the faces,
The trumpet-call, the wild boughs of white spring?
Would I might pluck you from forbidden spaces,
All ye, the vanished tenants of my places!

Stay but one moment, speak that I may hear,
Swift passer-by!
The wind of your strange garments in my ear
Catches the heart like a belovèd cry
From lips, alas, forgotten utterly.

An odour haunts, a colour in the mesh,
A step that mounts the stair;
Come to me, I would touch your living flesh--
Look how they disappear, ah, where, ah, where?
Because I name them not, deaf to my prayer.

If I could only call them as I used,
Each by his name!
That violin--what ancient voice that mused!
Yon is the hill, I see the beacon flame.
My feet have found the road where once I came.
Quick--but again the dark, darkness and shame.

THE BATTLE AGAINST THE SHERMAN LAW

HOW CAPITAL AND LABOR COMBINE TO SAFEGUARD THE TRUST AND LEGALIZE THE BOYCOTT

BY BURTON J. HENDRICK

ILLUSTRATED WITH PHOTOGRAPHS

Under the existing laws of the United States, it is a crime to organize a combination of individuals or corporations into a business aggregation in restraint of trade. It is likewise a crime for labor men or labor unions in different States to combine for the prosecution of certain aggressive enterprises popularly described as boycotts. Any person convicted of engaging in either of these prohibited acts may be fined not more than $5,000 for each offense, or imprisoned for one year at hard labor, or both.

According to reliable estimates, there are in the neighborhood of five hundred large trusts or combinations that daily violate this law. There are many thousands of smaller corporations and business firms that indulge in secret practices for which their officers may at any time be lodged in jail. As for the national prohibition of boycotts, labor organizations openly exist for the express purpose of conducting them. The constitution of the most powerful labor organization in this country, the Federation of Labor, specifically provides for engaging in this form of industrial warfare.

The statute that outlaws these combinations of both capital and labor is the famous Sherman Anti-trust Law. It is one of the briefest, most pointed, and most comprehensive measures ever passed by Congress. It contains only about seven hundred words and would fill less than a page of this magazine. In its first three lines, without any modifications or circumlocutions, it declares illegal "every contract, combination in the form of trust or otherwise, or conspiracy, in restraint of trade or commerce among the several States or with foreign nations." The next few lines provide the punishment, cited above, for breaking the law. The Sherman Act does not say that "some combinations" are illegal and criminal, but that "every" one is. It does not provide that certain offenders may be punished, but that "every" one "shall be." It leaves absolutely no discretion to prosecuting officers or to the courts. Within its comprehensive folds are gathered, on the one hand, the most commanding captains of industry and the greatest railroad magnates; and, on the other, the most insignificant puddlers in their furnaces and stokers on their trains.

The Sherman Act has thus established a community of interest between labor and capital which has had important practical results. Both capital and labor are openly evading the law. Both have many times been haled into court, convicted of infringing this statute, and enjoined from continuing in their illegal combinations. Both consequently find it an irksome impediment to their present plans and ambitions. In their active opposition to the law the two previously warring elements now meet on common ground.

The platform of the Republican party calls for amendments which, to all practical purposes, will seriously weaken the law, so far as its application to corporate combinations is concerned. The Democratic platform demands such changes as will exempt labor unions from its operation,--which is virtually the same thing as demanding the legalization of the boycott. At the last session of Congress the spectacle was presented of important labor unions and great corporation lawyers working hand in hand to this common end. Though this agitation failed for the time being, it may safely be asserted that the repeal or modification of the Sherman Act will continue to be a fixed article of the policy both of large aggregations of wealth and of large aggregations of labor. This fact makes important a study of its history and of its practical effects upon corporate and labor organizations.

_The Sherman Law Not Rushed Through Congress_

Hardly any important legislation has been so imperfectly understood or more persistently misrepresented. Although the law was passed only eighteen years ago, a large number of legends have already grown up about it. According to popular belief, the Sherman Anti-trust Act is an imperfect piece of legislation; a measure which was drawn up hastily, without thorough study or knowledge of the economic and social problems which it was intended to solve. The corporations declare that it was never intended to meet industrial conditions as they exist now: labor leaders have repeatedly asserted that the framers of the measure never intended that it should affect organizations of labor.

A study of the congressional debates which preceded the passage of the Sherman Act dissipates these misconceptions. The law was not rushed through Congress. It was seriously proposed as a carefully thought-out attempt to check great and clearly comprehended evils. In essence those evils did not differ from the ones which confront the American people today. In 1890 the trust, or the industrial combination, had almost reached its present state of development. Large aggregations of capital had already secured a monopoly of many of the necessaries of life. The Standard Oil Trust was then, as it is now, the most conspicuous of these combinations, and had already attained an unpopularity almost as great as it enjoys today; the Sugar Trust controlled practically the whole output of refined sugar. The Steel Trust, it is true, did not exist; but many combinations in steel products had already been formed. Combinations on steel rails dictated prices; nails, barbed fence wire, copper, lead, nickel, zinc, cordage, cottonseed oil,--all these products had already been brought largely under trust control. The Salt Trust and the Whiskey Trust had been organized. Combinations of railroads, for the purpose of fixing charges for transportation, had existed for twenty-five years. In 1875 Commodore Vanderbilt called the first great meeting of railroad trunk lines at Saratoga; and this conference adopted a "pooling" arrangement. The accumulated railroad abuses of a generation, especially this practice of "pooling" earnings, had led to the passage of the Interstate Commerce Act in 1887--three years before the enactment of the Sherman Law.

Other combinations, which disdained the name of trusts, but which had already developed certain points in common with them, also flourished. The labor union, for example, was in full flower. The Knights of Labor, under Powderly, had passed through many triumphant years; the Federation of Labor was firmly entrenched, and Samuel Gompers was its President then as he is today. The unions existed then, as they do now, to secure higher wages and greater advantages of employment for their members; and one of their weapons then, as it is at present, was the boycott. Organizations of farmers, which existed for a similar purpose--the Farmers' Alliance, the National League--had also reached a high state of development.

_Statesmen who Framed the Sherman Law_

Nor were the framers of this law inexperienced legislators who hastily scrambled together a measure to meet certain political exigencies. The men chiefly responsible for the anti-trust law were John Sherman of Ohio, George F. Edmunds of Vermont, George F. Hoar of Massachusetts, George Gray of Delaware, and James Z. George of Mississippi. Senator Spooner recently declared that no greater body of lawyers ever sat in Congress; no one would venture to contend that there is any similar group of five men in Washington today. John Sherman had served almost continuously in Congress since 1854; he had represented Ohio in the Senate throughout the Civil War and the reconstruction period, displaying especial talent in dealing with questions of national finance; and, as Secretary of the Treasury in President Hayes' cabinet, had carried through with masterly success the resumption of specie payments. George F. Edmunds was generally regarded as the greatest lawyer then in the Senate. Starting his career in that body in 1866, when Congress had to handle the intricate constitutional problems involved in the readmission of the Southern States, he immediately became one of an influential group of which the other members were Sumner, Fessenden, Trumbull, and Wade, and took an important part in framing the legislation of the reconstruction period. George F. Hoar had, by 1890, represented Massachusetts in the Senate for thirteen years; his great learning, his comprehensive knowledge of public questions, his independence, his genuine devotion to the best public interests had made him one of the most commanding figures in that body. George Gray of Delaware, at present a judge of the United States Circuit Court, and for many years one of the most conservative forces in the Democratic party--the same George Gray upon whom many of Mr. Bryan's opponents hoped to unite a few months ago as the Democratic presidential nominee--was also recognized as one of the Senate's greatest authorities on the Constitution. Senator George had served for many years as chief justice of the Supreme Court of Mississippi, and was the author and compiler of many works on law which are still widely used.

Over the question of federal control of large combinations these five men and their colleagues debated for nearly two years. Senator Sherman introduced his first anti-trust act August 14, 1888; the present statute finally became a law on July 21, 1890. During this period six separate trust bills, all modifications of that originally introduced by Mr. Sherman, were laid before the Senate. They were considered by two committees--the Finance and the Judiciary--and debated at great length in the committee of the whole. The discussions occupy one hundred and fifty pages of the Congressional Record.

A striking illustration of the general ignorance of the circumstances under which the Sherman Act was passed is furnished by the present Republican platform. This declares that "the Republican party passed the Sherman Anti-Trust Act over Democratic opposition." The records of Congress, however, show no indications of any opposition at all, Democratic or other. Of the five men most conspicuous in framing the law, three were Republicans and two were Democrats. In the Senate only one senator voted against the passage; in the House two hundred and forty-two votes were cast in favor of the act, and not a single one was cast against it. The whole debate was notable for its seriousness and its dignity; one or two Democrats did suggest that a revision of the tariff might help to curb the trusts; but that was the only partisan note struck. Congress keenly appreciated the issues raised by the trust problem and the necessity of taking action that would be beneficial and permanent. Everybody realized, also, the inherent difficulties of the situation. The debates in the Senate on this issue, far from indicating a scrappy investigation, furnish material for a liberal education in the constitutional questions involved in dealing with monopolies. Senator Hoar, in preparation for the work, studied the history of legislation concerning monopolies from the time of Zeno. One of the sections in the bill--that providing that a successful litigant against a trust can recover three times the damages suffered from it--Mr. Hoar incorporated from a statute on monopolies passed in the reign of James I.

_Sherman Act Intended to Apply to Labor Unions_

Of all the legends which have grown up about this law, perhaps the most absurd is that it was never intended to apply to workingmen. "As a matter of fact," said Samuel Gompers before the Judiciary Committee of the House last winter, "every man who now lives and is familiar with the legislation of the day knows that the Sherman Anti-trust Law was never intended to include organizations of labor," Chief Justice Fuller, in a recent decision of the United States Supreme Court, flatly contradicts Mr. Gompers' statement. "The records of Congress show," says Justice Fuller, "that several efforts were made to exempt, by legislation, organizations of farmers and laborers from the operation of the act and that all these efforts failed," In fact, the question of the relation of labor unions and the law occupied a conspicuous place in the debates; it was almost as constantly in the minds of the Senators as the question of capitalistic combinations themselves. To meet this situation, Senator Sherman introduced an amendment specifically excepting labor unions and agricultural associations from the operation of his statute. Mr. Gompers, according to his remarks before the Judiciary Committee last winter, was partly responsible for the introduction of this amendment. Senator Edmunds opposed it on the ground that it granted rights to labor which it withheld from capital, and he insisted that both sides should be treated upon an exact equality. In the following words he disposed for all time of Senator Sherman's plea for preferential treatment of laboring men:

The fact is that this matter of capital, as it is called, of
business, and of labor, is an equation, and you cannot disturb one
side of the equation without disturbing the other. If it costs
for labor 50 per cent. more to produce a ton of iron, that 50 per
cent. more goes into what that iron must sell for, or some part of
it. I take it everybody will agree to that.

Very well. Now, if you say to one side of that equation, "You may
make the value or the price of this iron by your combination for
wages in the whole Republic or on the continent, but the man for
whom you have made the iron shall not arrange with his neighbors
as to the price they will sell it for, so as not to destroy each
other," the whole business will certainly break, because the
connection between the plant, as I will call it for short, and
the labor that works that plant, is one that no legislation and
no force in the world--and there is only one outside of the world
that can do it--can possibly separate. They cannot be divorced.
Neither speeches nor laws nor judgments of courts nor anything
else can change it, and therefore I say that to provide on one
side of that equation that there may be combination and on the
other side that there shall not, is contrary to the very inherent
principle upon which such business must depend. If we are to have
equality, as we ought to have, if the combination on the one side
is to be prohibited, the combination on the other side must be
prohibited, or there will be certain destruction in the end....

On the one side you say that it is a crime and on the other side
you say it is a valuable and proper under-taking. That will
not do, Mr. President. You can not get on in that way. It is
impossible to separate them; and the principle of it therefore is
that if one side, no matter which it is, is authorized to combine,
the other side must be authorized to combine, or the thing will
break and there will be universal bankruptcy. That is what it will
come to.

Senator Edmunds' logic absolutely killed any attempt to place capital and labor upon different footings, Instead of adopting this proposed amendment, the Senate referred the whole question of trust legislation to the Judiciary Committee, of which Senator Edmunds was chairman. Mr. Edmunds and his colleagues threw into the waste basket all the pending trust bills and their amendments and struck out on new lines. As a consequence, Senator Edmunds became the chief author of the Sherman Anti-Trust Law. His most active associates, were Senator Hoar and Senator George. The one man who had practically nothing to do with the statute as it stands to-day was Senator Sherman himself. He played an important part in the preliminary discussion and in framing the measures which served as a basis for this discussion; but the bill as it was finally adopted by Congress bore little resemblance to his. The amendment upon which he laid especial stress--that of exempting laboring and agricultural organizations from the operation of the Anti-trust Law--was absolutely ignored.

As finally adopted, the act did not prohibit labor unions per se or combinations of labor unions formed to accomplish lawful ends; it did, however, strike at certain labor union practices. That this was the clear intention of the Senate is evident from a statement made by Senator Edmunds in a newspaper interview as far back as 1892. "The Sherman Law," said Mr. Edmunds, "is intended to cover and I think will cover every form of combination that seeks in any way to interfere with or restrain free competition, whether it be capital in the form of trusts, combinations, railroad pools, or agreements, or labor through the form of boycotting organizations that say a man shall not earn his bread unless he joins this or that society. Both are wrong; both are crimes and indictable under the Anti-trust Law."

_Unsuccessful Efforts to Destroy the Law_

For eighteen years the anti-trust statute has represented American policy and American law in federal regulation of combinations in restraint of trade. In that period the act has been repeatedly assailed from many legal standpoints. It has been passed upon more than two hundred and fifty times by the federal courts, and has been considered fifty-five times by the United States Supreme Court. The greatest constitutional lawyers of this generation--such men as Edward J. Phelps, James C. Carter, John F. Dillon, and Francis Lynde Stetson--have attempted to destroy it and have not succeeded. The greatest railroads and corporations, on the one hand, and the largest and most influential labor unions, on the other, have both failed in their attempts to secure exemption from its operation.

The history of the Sherman Act has absolutely justified the wisdom and integrity of the Supreme Court. Scores of times the lower courts have decided against the government; and the most important decisions have been those in which the Supreme Court has reversed the inferior tribunals. The record of federal prosecutions under this law affords an interesting insight into the attitude of the several administrations toward trust regulation. President Harrison, under whose administration the law was passed, accomplished little. His attorney-general brought seven actions--four bills in equity and three criminal indictments. Under the equity proceedings, he obtained three injunctions; the criminal proceedings all ended in failure. One of the cases instituted by President Harrison, however,--that against the Trans-Missouri Freight Association,--was afterward taken to the Supreme Court by President Cleveland's attorney-general, and resulted in securing one of the most important decisions in the history of the law.

President Cleveland showed considerably more activity than his predecessor. Though only eight proceedings stand to his credit, several of them were of the greatest importance. He used the Sherman Law in fighting the Debs cases growing out of the Pullman strike; and in the well-known Addyston Pipe & Steel Company case he dissolved a combination, formed by several manufacturers of gas and sewer pipe, to monopolize the trade of most large American municipalities. President McKinley apparently had little interest in the Sherman Law; throughout his four and a half years only three cases were prosecuted, none of which were of much consequence. With the administration of President Roosevelt, however, the situation changed. Against the seven cases instituted by Harrison, the eight by Cleveland, the three by McKinley, stand thirty-seven started by Roosevelt. That is, he has instituted twice as many cases as all his predecessors combined, and many of the Roosevelt prosecutions have proved successful. Nineteen of these thirty-seven cases have already been decided; the government has won seventeen and lost only two.

As a result of these many proceedings and interpretations, the Sherman Anti-trust Law is now fairly well understood. There has recently been much complaint that the law is not sufficiently "specific"; that business men and labor leaders are groping very much in the dark; that it is impossible to say what this statute prohibits and what it permits. From the judicial literature which has accumulated in the last eighteen years, however, a fairly clear idea of its bearings upon large enterprises, both of labor and capital, can be obtained. Senator Hoar declared, when the bill came up for final passage, that it enunciated no new principle of law. It made illegal "restraints of trade" and "monopolies," but these had been for centuries unlawful in all Anglo-Saxon countries. As far back as the reign of Henry VI. in England, in 1436, a law was passed declaring that "all agreements in restraint of trade are illegal and voide." This principle has ever since been part of the law of England, and is at present part of the common law of many States in the Union.

In the United States itself, however,--that is, in the federal courts--there is no common law; everything must be fixed and regulated by statute. What the Sherman Act did was to make this common law on the subjects of restraints and monopolies the statute law of the United States. Under the common law of practically every State, monopolies and restraining combinations were illegal; Congress made these illegal when they involved inter-State trade. Under the common law boycotts were illegal also; Congress made illegal the inter-State boycott. Congressional action on this subject was demanded, because the larger number of these unlawful combinations could be reached only by federal action, inasmuch as they usually involved more than one State.

Under the rulings of the Supreme Court, combinations and conspiracies which restrain trade and develop monopolies are those which, broadly speaking, deprive the public of the benefits of free competition. This act recognizes the competitive system as the one industrial ideal, and outlaws anything that interferes with a free, unobstructed flow of trade. A trust that gets control of the larger part of a particular product and manipulates the output so as to prevent trade from flowing in its natural course--that is an illegal restraint. Labor unions that combine to divert artificially this same course of trade--as they unquestionably do when they persuade the public not to have business relations with particular persons or corporations against which they have declared a boycott--also engage in an illegal restraint. The Sherman Law aims only to protect the public against these unnatural influences; to restore business to normal conditions. With corporations, the final test as to whether they restrain trade or not is whether their effect is to increase prices. If they do not increase prices, then they do not restrain trade and consequently do not violate the Sherman Act. The Supreme Court has insisted upon one important modification of this principle. The effect upon prices must be immediate and not remote. An arbitrary agreement that definitely fixes the prices of a product is clearly illegal; an agreement which, in the last analysis, might tend to influence prices, would not necessarily be so.

_Railroads Stopped from Making Rate Agreements_

In the first ten years after the passing of the Sherman Act, the government attacked most successfully, not the great solidified aggregations of capital popularly known as trusts, but the more or less loosely organized federations of corporations, formed chiefly for the purpose of regulating and establishing prices. Trade agreements, not monopolistic corporations, became its chief quarry. In proscribing these agreements as illegal, the Sherman Act was found to be extremely effective. The very first case under this law was directed against a combination of coal-mining companies in Kentucky and Tennessee, which existed for the express purpose of regulating output and fixing prices. The courts promptly decided that this agreement violated the Sherman Act. In 1892 eighteen railroads, nearly all operating west of the Missouri River, organized what they called the Trans-Missouri Freight Association. This association included many of the great Western roads, companies of the magnitude of the Santa Fé, the Missouri Pacific, and the Rock Island. Its object, as clearly stated in the articles of association, was "mutual protection by establishing and maintaining reasonable rates, rules, and regulations, in all freight traffic, both through and local." In other words, it proposed to fix arbitrarily the price of transportation throughout the enormous territory covered by the eighteen railroads in question. The old "pooling" agreements, which had existed for many years, had been prohibited by the Interstate Commerce Law passed in 1887; and this Traffic Association was an attempt to accomplish the same end--that is, stop competition among the railroads and maintain rates--in a different way. The Supreme Court, by a vote of five to four, decided that this agreement was prohibited by the Sherman Anti-trust Act, because, as an attempt to fix prices, it restrained trade. The famous Trans-Missouri decision, which settled this case, made the Sherman Law an insurmountable bulwark against all railroad combinations of this kind. Until this decision was finally given in 1897, this act had not been seriously regarded; after the Supreme Court had spoken, however, capitalists suddenly awoke to its significance. The decision settled many important points, which will be referred to subsequently in this article, and it changed as well the whole policy of railroad management.

The Sherman Act has stopped, not only railroad combinations, but similar agreements existing among manufacturers for the regulation of prices. The case of the Addyston Pipe & Steel Company is the most celebrated of this kind. In 1894 a large number of manufacturers of sewer and gas pipe, the Addyston Company being one, formed a combination to monopolize business and fix prices in thirty-six States and Territories. All companies which were parties to the agreement reserved the right to compete with each other outside of these thirty-six States as fiercely as before. They significantly called the section in which there was to be no competition "pay territory"; and the States outside of this section were known as "free territory." These manufacturers dealt chiefly with municipalities, which usually let contracts for sewer and gas pipe by public bidding. Whenever such a contract was offered, the Addyston combination would meet secretly, decide upon the price they would charge, and then arrange a program of fictitious bids. They then divided the profits among themselves. In this way they forced practically all purchasers in the sections in which they traded to pay exorbitant prices. Indeed, the subsequent history of this combination beautifully illustrates the practical effect upon the public of agreements of this kind. The Addyston and its associate members sold certain pipe in "pay territory," where the combination was enforced, at twenty-four dollars a ton; in "free territory," where they competed with each other, they frequently sold identically the same product at fourteen dollars. The Supreme Court decided that this agreement violated the Sherman Act--that it was a combination or a conspiracy in restraint of trade. William H. Taft, then United States Circuit Judge, wrote an opinion discussing the merits of this dispute which has since become a legal classic. Mr. Taft spent six months in studying the questions involved.

Nearly all such cases, however, involved merely what may be called trade agreements. In each case there were actual attempts to fix prices by compact, and these agreements were the only things in common among the different corporations that became parties to them. The several corporations preserved their independent existence; they were not trusts in the sense in which the Standard Oil Company, the American Sugar Refining Company, the United States Steel Company, are trusts--that is, single corporations, producing and distributing the greater part of some particular product. Until President Roosevelt's administration, these trusts had, for the larger part, escaped prosecution under the Sherman Law, the few attempts that had been made to assail them; having ingloriously failed.

Meanwhile, in the first twelve years after the passage of the Anti-trust Act, and in the teeth of it, some of the largest monopolistic corporations were formed. Many persons have maintained that the Sherman Law, far from forestalling these corporations, has actually precipitated them. Their point is that, since this act clearly outlawed trade agreements among independent corporations, these corporations, in order to get control of the situation, have been compelled to amalgamate themselves under one ownership. The Sherman Act made illegal, for example, rate agreements among railroads; as a consequence, in order to control railroad policy, the owners of the great trunk lines have purchased large blocks of stock in each other's property--on what is popularly known as the "community of interest" idea.

President Roosevelt, however, has succeeded in applying the Sherman Act to the trusts, as that word is popularly understood. The famous Northern Securities case is his greatest victory along that line. In this instance, Mr. J. J. Hill and J. Pierpont Morgan formed a new corporation, the Northern Securities Company, which acquired the actual stock ownership of nine-tenths of the stock of the Northern Pacific Railroad and three-fourths of that of the Great Northern. The Northern Securities Company thus obtained a virtual monopoly of railroad transportation from the Great Lakes to the Pacific Ocean in the northern section of the United States. The Roosevelt administration, relying solely upon the Sherman Act, destroyed this corporation. The administration has followed up this victory by instituting suits against the Standard Oil Company, the American Tobacco Company, and other powerful monopolies.

_Labor Unions, as Such, Not Prohibited_

Meanwhile, the same law has proved an effective weapon in opposing that other form of combination and restraint against which it was framed,--the labor trust. Under it a new code of federal laws affecting labor unions has developed; and to a large extent it has strengthened the cause of legitimate labor organization. No intelligent person now disputes the right of workingmen to organize. A few labor leaders have publicly declared their apprehension that the Sherman Law prohibits peaceable labor organizations; no man, however, has thus far had the hardihood to raise this question legally; and, in the present state of public opinion as to the rights of labor, no one is likely to. The United States Courts, in decisions defining the scope of the Sherman Act, have specifically stated that it does not prohibit the ordinary peaceful activities of labor unions. Justice White, in a decision of the Supreme Court, has declared that an agreement among "locomotive engineers, firemen, or trainmen engaged in the service of an inter-State railroad not to work for less than a certain named compensation" would not be illegal. William H. Taft, in one of the most important decisions affecting the rights of workmen under the Sherman Act, has defined the situation in words which are now widely accepted as a clear statement of what is not only good law but sound public policy:

The employees of the receiver had the right to organize into or
join a labor union which would take action as to the terms of
their employment. It is a benefit to them and to the public
that laborers should unite for their common interest and for
lawful purposes. They have labor to sell. If they stand together,
they are often able, all of them, to obtain better prices for
their labor than dealing singly with rich employers, because
the necessities of the single employee may compel him to accept
any price that is offered. The accumulation of a fund for those
who feel that the wages offered are below the legitimate market
value of such labor is desirable. They have the right to appoint
officers, who shall advise them as to the course to be taken in
relations with their employers. They may unite with other unions.
The officers they appoint, or any other person they choose to
listen to, may advise them as to the proper course to be taken in
regard to their common employment; or if they choose to appoint
any one, he may order them on pain of expulsion from the union
peaceably to leave the employ of their employer because any of the
terms of the employment are unsatisfactory.

It is clearly indicated, therefore, what labor leaders, under the Sherman Act, can do. They have the right to organize, to combine--that is, to form unions; they have the right to refuse to work for wages or terms of employment unsatisfactory to themselves--that is, to strike. Under the Sherman Act, indeed, mere organizations of laboring men are regarded as no more outlawed than ordinary social clubs or college fraternities.

_How the Chicago Strike of 1894 Restrained Trade_

On the other hand, labor leaders know what, under the Sherman Act, they can not do. They cannot enter into combinations that restrain trade. This vital point has been settled in several important proceedings--those involving the Chicago disturbances in 1894, and, more recently the decision just handed down in the matter of the Danbury Hatters. These cases so clearly show the bearing of the Sherman Act upon illegal labor practices, that they may profitably be reviewed here.

CONGRESSMAN CHARLES E. LITTLEFIELD OF MAINE, WHOSE KEEN ANALYSIS OF
LAST WINTER'S CIVIC FEDERATION TRUST BILL WAS LARGELY RESPONSIBLE FOR
ITS DEFEAT]

In 1894 the employees of the Pullman Palace Car Company of Chicago struck for higher wages. These employees were not railway men; they were workmen engaged in the manufacture of railway cars. In spite of this, about four thousand had been admitted to membership in the American Railway Union, an organization of railroad operatives, which, under the vigorous management of Eugene V. Debs, had acquired a membership of 250,000, and a correspondingly great power in the field of railroad labor. In order to help the Pullman workmen in their struggle with the Pullman Company, the American Railway Union declared what was in effect a boycott upon all railroads using Pullman cars. Nearly all the larger American railroads had entered into contracts with the Pullman Company, by which parlor and sleeping cars were to be used on their trains. Debs now demanded that these railroads should break their contracts, and thereby, of course, become responsible for heavy damages to the Pullman Company. In other words, he demanded that all American railroads cease patronizing the Pullman Company because of its "unfair" attitude toward union labor; that is, he started a boycott against the Pullman Company. When the railroad companies refused to meet his demand, he ordered out all American Railway Union men employed on these lines. He even declared war upon several of the Vanderbilt roads, which had no Pullman sleepers, operating instead the Wagner cars. In effect, in order that several thousand workmen in Chicago might profitably settle their private grievances with their employers, Debs proposed, practically to end railroad communication in the larger part of the United States.

"The gigantic character of the conspiracy," said William H. Taft in a well-known decision resulting from these proceedings, "staggers the imagination. The railroads have become as necessary to the life and health and comfort of the people of this country as are the arteries to the human body." The larger part of our food supply, for example, is furnished by means of the railway; the interruption of railroad transportation for any considerable period would, among other calamities, bring famine upon large sections of the country. In Chicago, in Cincinnati, and in other large cities, Debs despatched his lieutenants with orders to tie up all railroads using Pullman cars. He gave particular instructions to interfere with freight trains, since freight was the main source of railroad revenue. In many places riots followed; in Chicago, strikers began wrecking trains, blowing up bridges, burning freight yards, tearing up tracks--indeed, nearly all the twenty-three railroads centering in that city ceased operations. The fundamental principles of the constitution, guaranteeing the safety of life and property, had apparently given way to lawlessness and anarchy. In the opinion of Grover Cleveland, then President of the United States, these proceedings constituted a "conspiracy in restraint of trade" among the States, and as such were prohibited by the Sherman Act. That the purpose and effect of Debs' proceedings was to restrain trade is sufficiently clear; indeed, no more complete restraint than the cessation of railroad communication could be imagined. Trade in this case was not only restrained; it was entirely stopped. That the means by which this was to be accomplished had all the essential elements of the inter-State boycott has also been shown. In several cities, acting under the President's instructions, United States district attorneys obtained injunctions on the ground that the strike leaders were violating the Sherman Act, and also interfering with the carriage of United States mails. In Chicago Eugene V. Debs was enjoined, and, when he disobeyed the injunction, was arrested and afterward sentenced to six months' imprisonment. In Cincinnati his associate, Frank W. Phelan, was likewise enjoined and likewise imprisoned for contempt. It was his act as judge in sending Phelan to prison for violating the Sherman Law that first made William H. Taft a national figure. The circuit courts[J] decided, in several cases, that the combination formed by Debs against nearly all the trunk lines was a boycott, "a conspiracy in restraint of trade," and punished the leaders, under the Sherman Act. William H. Taft declared that "the combination is in the teeth of the act of July 2, 1890."

_The Danbury Hatters Attempt to "Restrain Trade"_