Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 1.djvu/678

666 they were not slow to avail themselves, and of which they have made the most.

It is a significant fact that during the same period of time when our legislatures, including the federal congress, have been going off upon a quasi-mediæval tangent, the courts have for the most part been unswerved, and have in no notable instance been carried off their feet by the popular clamor. A great number of suits have been brought, in which it has been sought to commit the courts to the same radical views upon the subject which have been enacted into statutes, and in which it has been sought to secure adjudications upon the economic questions involved—for the most part without success. And it is, I repeat, creditable to the courts that this is so. The decisions of the courts of last resort have, as a rule, in spite of the popular clamor, come down, year by year, in an orderly and consistent stream of precedent, substantially uninfluenced by the accidental excitement upon the questions of combination, competition and monopoly, which has more or less disordered the thinking of the soberest of us for the past half dozen years.

The courts, in the greater number of cases, have accordingly reflected somewhat more accurately than the statutes, the public policy of the times. No doubt the decision in the case of "The Monopolies" formulated the views upon the subject at that time. But, thence to the present, there has been a constant relaxation of the rule as far as it affects trade and commerce. A long line of decisions, both here and in England, illustrate this; and for the reason just indicated it is to the decisions that we are chiefly to look, rather than to the statutes, for the more correct and intelligent view of the public policy of the period.

It was as we have already seen a long step from the blind bigotry of Mr. Justice Hull, in the dyer's case in 1415, to the temperate language of Lord St. Leonards at the middle of the present century. It is a longer step from that decision in the House of Lords, to the latest cases in point, which declare and define the public policy of the present day. Let us look for a moment at some of them, and, having seen how essentially public