Page:The Presidents of the United States, 1789-1914, v. IV.djvu/164

128 LIVES OF THE PRESIDENTS Sherman Anti-Trust law, to compel the divorce of the Great Northern and Northern Pacific rail roads has been already mentioned. Other suits as for instance against the Tobacco Trust were subsequently instituted : but in connection with this famous Sherman Law it must be most distinctly emphasized that Mr. Roosevelt has always, in con stant messages and in other public utterances, urged that it be amended in such way as to define and direct its present altogether too general and sweeping scope. The divorce of the two systems in the Northern Securities was obviously "reason able" from the public standpoint; the divorce of the Southern and Union Pacific, decreed in 1912, has been thought less "reasonable"; the situations were far from identical; yet logically, as the lan guage of the Sherman Law now stands, the Court would have been obliged to interpolate some discre tion of its own to escape its decision. The Court s use of the word "reasonable" in another case was a manifest exercise of common sense in the opinion of many people and was also bitterly assailed by many other people as an arbitrary piece of "ju dicial legislation." It has been Mr. Roosevelt s very sensible conviction that the language of no law should be able to place a Court in such a position. But so far, the Sherman Law stands unamended to the great satisfaction of those who have no