actual injury to the public, and competitive contracts to avert personal ruin may be perfectly reasonable."
In a recent case in the Northwest, we find this sober language:
Modern investigations have much modified the views of courts, as well as political economists, as to the effect of contracts intended to reduce the number of competitors in any particular line of business. Excessive competition is not now accepted as necessarily conducive to the public good. The fact is, that the early common law doctrine in regard to contracts in restraint of trade largely grew out of a state of society and of business which has ceased to exist, and hence the doctrine has been much modified, as will be seen by comparison of the early English cases with modern decisions both English and American.[1]
While thus larger and larger commercial freedom has been attained in the progress of time, as public policy has adapted itself to more modern conditions, it is curious to notice how, in some other directions and along some other closely parallel lines, the pendulum has swung the other way. Commercial contracts in restraint of trade have for one hundred and fifty years grown steadily in public favor, and have constantly secured greater and greater sanction in the courts, whilein certain otheranalogous matters the reins have essentially tightened up. Take, for example, public opinion regarding lotteries. Only a comparatively short time ago lotteries were entirely legal. Columbia College, my alma mater in the law, lawfully secured some part of its endowment, some part of the very fund by which it is now nurtured and maintained, from the profits of a lottery operated in its interest in the city of New York. That was only something more than an hundred years ago. But now no one believes, that the University of Chicago will ever secure any money in this way, and with the expiration of the charter of the Louisiana Lottery a year or two ago, all such business in this country became legally impossible. Public policy now strenuously condemns what a century ago it frankly sanctioned and approved.
For another example, consider the matter of wagers, from a
- ↑ National Benefit Company vs. Union Hospital Company, 45 Minn., 272.
