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The Legal World President Taff's Speech on the Sherman Act The speech delivered by President Taft at Detroit on Sept. 18 has been interpreted as exhibiting the purpose of the Administration to enforce the . Sherman anti-trust law in accordance with a construct'on which is distinctly unfavorable to the idea of legalized monopoly. The President said in part:
“I shall not attempt to give it a close lawyer-like interpretation, but I think
it is not departing from the declaration of the Court to say that they find any contract in restraint of trade, made for the purpose of excluding competition, controlling prices, or of maintaining a monopoly, in part or in whole, is con trary to the statute and is subject to injunction and indictment under this statute in the federal courts where it affects interstate trade. Now I would like to ask Mr. Bryan or any of the other publicists and jurists who have been de nouncing this opinion as the surrender of the rights of the people and a usurpa tion of judicial power to tell the public what particular contract or restraint of interstate trade he would condemn which would not be condemned within this definition of the Court. . . . “It is said that the Supreme Court has read something into the statute that was not there before; that it has inserted the word ‘reasonable’ before restraints of trade, when the same Court had said that this could not be properly done, because Congress had evidently not intended to include such a limiting word in the statute. This is not fair to the Court. It is true that the Court, in the early
days of the construction of the statute, had said that it could not limit the stat ute in effect by excluding from its opera tion what was deemed reasonable at com mon law. But as other cases arose it found it necessary to make exceptions to the literal operation of the words
‘restraint of trade,’ and it did so by excepting what was minor, or incidental, or indirect, and including only those cases where the chief object of the con tract or combination was the restraint. In doing so the Court said that it must give the statute a reasonable construc tion and not one leading to absurd or ridiculous results. In the last two cases the Court did not change the substance of the reasoning and scope of the pre vious decisions, but only treated the exceptions previously termed ‘inciden tal and indirect,’ as excluded from the operation of the statute in the light of reason; 1'. e., in conformity to the evil sought to be reached. Now, in what way has this injured the public weal? What combinations or arrangements can es cape under this interpretation that any sensible man would wish to have con demned? Did the Court not condemn the Standard Oil Company, the father of all trusts, in the history of which every form of criminal illegality was prac tised? Did it not, on the other hand, condemn the Tobacco Trust, of much later origin and framed under the advice of cunning counsel for the very purposes of evading the condemnation of the stat ute and at the same time securing and enjoying the monopoly the framers of the statute intended to prevent and
punish? . . .
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"It needed these two great decisions to teach the business public that “ at
least not in the supreme tribunal of this country would the claim be listened to,
that in this day and generation we have passed beyond the possibility of free competition as consistent with proper business growth, or that we have reached a time when only regulated monopoly and the fixing of prices by governmental authority are consistent with future prog ress. We did get along with competi tion; we can get along with it. We did
