and his agents and deputies should have the whole traffic and merchandise in playing cards, and that no other should have the right of making playing cards within the realm.
All trades, said the court, as well mechanical as otherwise, which prevent idleness (the bane of the commonwealth), exercising men and youth in labor for the maintenance of themselves and their families, and for the increase of their substance, to serve the Queen when occasion shall require, are profitable for the commonwealth, and, therefore, the grant to the plaintiff to have the sole making of them is against the common law, and the benefit and liberty of the subject.
It is upon such a key as this that a vast deal of discussion of this subject has proceeded thence to the present time. Serious men, and able and conscientious lawyers, have gravely argued in the United States, within the past ten years, to courts of justice, in cases involving the legality of modern commercial trusts, along precisely this line, and have seemed not to understand that the case of "The Monopolies" and other cases of the same sort, are no more valuable as authority or available in argument in the nineteenth century, upon the question of the legality of our commercial trusts, than if cited in a contention over the Monroe Doctrine.
The struggle of the English people against monopolies culminated in the passage of the statute of 21 James I, which attempted their prohibition. In a legal sense, monopoly at the present day simply means the obtaining, without a grant from the sovereign, of the exclusive power to carry on a certain trade or business. In a proper sense, the term monopoly is applied to every large and successful business enterprise; and some statutes, as, for example, the proposed legislation in Illinois against department stores, go so far as to seem to proceed upon the notion that, because an enterprise has attained large proportions, it is, in a legal sense, a monopoly—ergo, unlawful. Railways, national banks and corporations of all kinds are, in the view of that part of the public, in sympathy with such legislation as this, obnoxious as monopolies.
Recurring for a moment to the idea that considerations of
