unquestioned legal sanction as any other form of trading. It is already impossible to pass a federal statute making them unlawful, although attempts are made at almost every session of Congress to get a law of that sort enacted. In many of the states it is true that there are statutes upon the subject in which such dealing is more or less positively forbidden; but here again the courts have been and are in advance of the lawmakers, and more in line with the most enlightened public opinion. In spite of much attempt to legislate such dealings out of existence, the courts have, by refining and distinguishing the statutes which have been improvidently enacted upon the subject, secured to them a substantially unquestioned legality everywhere. Other illustrations will occur to every reader.
It is the function of a critic to criticise, and in this paper I have not attempted to suggest what legislation in restraint of trade, if any, might be expedient and politic; but rather to point out what appears to me to be the inherent weakness and inutility of the existing statutes of this character. There is, it goes without saying, such a thing as an unlawful restraint of trade, which is and ought to be contrary to public policy. My proposition is, however, that the legislation of the past six or eight years upon the subject in the United States, both state and federal, has been for the most part the outcome of a condition of the public temper not calculated to promote sane legislation; that it has been out of joint, and out of line with the most enlightened public policy; that all such legislation is unscientific, impolitic and fatuous, and that it cannot abide the wear and tear of even the next short time. The furore which occasioned it is already subsiding, and the country will grow more and more away from it, and leave it standing as a monument to the over zeal of ill-instructed or half-instructed legislators.
It will in the end do no great harm, like the pope's bull against the comet; and it will do some good if it serve as a warning to future law makers, that statutes which fly in the face of sound public sentiment had better not be enacted, and will not be
