production in order to enhance the price, or to exact unjust, unreasonable or excessive prices for necessaries. Intentionally to do any of these acts in a period of extreme public peril, would certainly be unpatriotic and wrongful. There can be no earthly reason, no reasonable foundation, for legislating that any citizen of the United States should be permitted to wage war against the vital interests of his country. And as food entirely arises and is produced from the soil, and can never serve its purpose if there destroyed, to no class should these prohibitions more urgently apply than those engaged in such primary production; and yet the Act actually provides: "That this section shall not apply to any farmer, gardener, horticulturist, vineyardist, planter, ranchman, dairyman, stockman, or other agriculturalist, with respect to the farm products produced or raised upon land owned, leased, or cultivated by him"; and then further provides that they alone can co-operate, so far as their production is concerned, in what the drafters of the Act are pleased to call "collective bargaining," and what the law in any other case would call "criminal conspiracy."
These provisions, it is conceived, are far from complimentary to the patriotism of a very large class, of which the writer is one, who, there is no reason to believe, wish to commit crimes against the welfare of their country in a time of its greatest peril.
But the Supreme Court, having already condemned and declared unconstitutional a far less vicious exemption found in a statute of the sovereign state of Illinois in an opinion covering nearly ten pages of most effective reasoning, it would be impertinent to attempt improvement, and the Connolly case,[1] is referred to
- ↑ The facts in Connolly vs. Union Sewer Pipe Co., 184 U. S. 540, 1902, were as follows: The Union Company brought suit
