Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 1.djvu/673

Rh with the change of condition; but a statute stands rigid on the statute book, and is the same thing yesterday, today and forever; so that it must be amended or repealed, or modified, or disregarded in the progress of time, as conditions change, in order not to be quite out of tune and touch with the orderly progression of things.

This is something which the rural legislator, in his zeal to pass laws upon the subject of trade, seems entirely to have overlooked. Accordingly this inexorable fact has been the undoing of his work. By reference to the law books, he is informed with sweeping generality, that at common law monopolies are illegal and void. If he be industrious and curious, and reads Norman French, he finds out that, as early as the reign of Henry V, in the year 1415, a case, which seems to have been the first case of the sort, arose, in which a dyer had bound himself not to exercise his trade for half a year in the same town with the plaintiff. In an action on the bond, this was held to be an unlawful agreement, as in restraint of trade. This case was decided long before there was any statute on the subject, and from it has come down to us, in ordinary generation, a long line of decisions upon the general question there involved. At a later time patents or grants of the crown, in the nature of monopolies, to certain persons or corporations, secured to them the exclusive right to carry on some business, trade or avocation. We need not recount the familiar history of the creation of these monopolies, commencing about the time of Henry VIII, or a little later. By the forty-fourth year of the reign of Queen Elizabeth, these grants had begun to attract the attention of the courts, and in the case of "The Monopolies," reported by Lord Coke, they were declared to be illegal at Common Law. There was still no statute on the subject, and the argument ran back to the old case of the dyer in the reign of Henry V. In the case of "The Monopolies," which is the leading case upon the subject, it appeared that one Darcy had been granted the exclusive right to buy beyond the sea all such playing cards as he thought good, and to make and sell them within the Kingdom, that he