is now before the House, thought depended upon some rule of common law, regardless of policy, was founded upon public policy, and has been restrained and limited and qualified up to this very hour, and beneficially so, by that very policy which it is supposed had no bearing at all upon the foundation of the rule.[1]
All legislation affecting monopolies, or in any sort of restraint of trade, is meant to be, or pretended or intended to be declaratory of the common law. This is especially true of the recent legislation upon that behalf in the United States. It has not, as far ar I know, been attempted by any of these statutes from the first one, in the reign of James I, to the last one in the reign of Grover Cleveland, to make anything unlawful which was not assumed or supposed to be so at common law. The statute of James I declared the law as it was understood then to be—as for an example, it had been decided to be in the case of "The Monopolies," and all the later statutes have ostensibly done the same thing.
In this country prior to about the year 1889, the subject of monopolies, or contracts in restraint of trade, had not attracted the particular attention of our legislatures. Occasional decisions of the courts had assumed to prescribe common law rules, but no statute, state or federal, of any radical or strenuous character, had been enacted. During the two or three years prior to 1889, however, the attention of the public was called to the subject by the discovery that a large number of commercial trusts were in existence in the United States, which were, or which were assumed or supposed to be, monopolizing, or tending to monopolize, various lines of business. This was assumed to be in violation of the rights of the public, and statutes were at once proposed to remedy what it was taken for granted was a growing evil. Men looked into the law and found in the old English statutes, and especially in the earlier reports, much desultory denunciation of "monopoly," and much generalization upon the blessings and benefits of competition in trade. This, upon a superficial view, seemed to fit the case, and statutes were
- ↑ Egerton vs. Earl Brownlow, 4 H. L. Cas. 237.
