77/6' Green Judge Holmes. Their opinion seems to be mainly attributable to a feeling that, as a matter of fact, a patrol must carry with it a threat of bodily harm. The late Chief Jus tice and Judge Holmes wrote powerful dis senting opinions. Judge Holmes indicated what he believed to be the proper mode of approaching the question. He agreed that the plaintiff had shown a cause of action when he had proved that the defendants had conspired to injure his business, and had actually injured it. unless the defendants could show some ground of excuse or justi fication. What constitutes such justification? The principles of free competition justify a man who sets up a second store in a country town too small to support more than one, although he expects and intends thereby to ruin some one already there, and succeeds in his intent. "The reason, of course," says Judge Holmes, is that the doctrine gener ally has been accepted that free competition is worth more to society than it costs, and that on this ground the infliction of the dam age is privileged." Do not the same princi ples justify one workman in persuading an other, not under contract to work, by appeals to the interest of his class, by social pressure, by whatever peaceable argument is likely to prove effective, not to help out the other side in the universal struggle for life? How otherwise can the game be played fairly? The question of what shall amount to a justifica tion is to be decided on considerations of policy and social advantage. "It is vain to suppose that solutions can be attained merely by logic and the general propositions of law which nobody disputes." Judge Holmes con cludes: "It is plain from the slightest consid eration of practical affairs, or the most super ficial reading of industrial history, that free competition means combination, and that the organization of the world, now going on so fast, means an ever increasing might and scope of combination. It seems to rne futile to set our faces against this tendency.
Whether beneficial on the whole, as I think it, or detrimental, it is inevitable, unless the fundamental axioms of society, and even the fundamental conditions of life, are to be changed. . . . Combination on the one side is patent and powerful. Combination on the other is the necessary and desirable counterpart, if the battle is to be carried on in a fair and equal way." The case of Vegelahn v. Guntner has been stated at this length, not because of the ad mirably explicit confession of Judge Holmes' economic faith just quoted, but because in it Judge Holmes states with so much per spicuity the proper method of attacking these questions, the method of approach which, it is believed, must ultimately prevail every where. It did prevail in the later Massachu setts case of Plant r. Woods, 176 Mass. 492, decided four years later, in 1900. That case arose out of a contest for supremacy between two labor unions of the same craft. The members of the defendant union conspired to force the members of the plaintiff union to amalgamate with them, and in order to carry out their purpose threatened employers of members of the plaintiff union with strikes and boycotts, unless they asked their em ployees to enter the defendant union, on im plied pain of discharge. The majority of the court thought that strikes and boycotts de signed to benefit the strikers not directly, by raising wages or shortening the hours of labor, but merely indirectly by strengthening their union, ought to be enjoined. Judge Holmes again dissented, thinking that strikes were as lawful for the purpose of strengthening the union "as a preliminary and means to enable it to make a better fight on questions of wages or other matters of clashing interests" as for the final purpose to which strengthening the union was a means. It is hardly to be expected, perhaps it is hardly desirable, that all the members of the court should think alike on the question of policy and economics involved in this deci
