Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 5.djvu/432

 41 8 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

The Legal Aspect of Trusts. — There is little difference between the decisions before and after the passage of anti-trust acts. Judicial interpretation has inter- polated necessary words of limitation or construction, just as if the words " unjusti- fiable," "unreasonable," "partaking of conspiracy," "prejudicial to the public interest," etc., had been written into the statutes themselves.

The supreme court of the United States, for the time being, and because it alone can speak finally on this subject, must, until popular sentiment has been awakened to better appreciation of the needs of the freedom of commercial relations, be the refuge for persecuted capital and persecuted ability. Not all corporations need this protec- tion ; not all corporations are entitled to it. Some corporations may be organized, not in the interest of trade and commerce, but in the interest of the restraint of trade and commerce. Such corporations may become public enemies; but the great class of corporations of which we are speaking, though brought into being by motives of profit among those interested and having for their object larger returns through labor-saving devices and selected ability, are not to be frowned upon or their evil influence guessed about or assumed by the courts. If one corporation offends, let it receive the punishment. Let others be unmolested.

While the courts have protected individuals and corporations in the enjoyment of their rights, they have net failed to give appropriate definitions of what are omis- sions by the individual or the corporation of their obligations to the community, or to make it quite clear what corporations are and what are not entitled to the benefit of these decisions.

Men or corporations may not conspire to fix the value or limit the output of a necessary of life ; corporations may not enter into copartnership with one another ; they must not create or seek to create monopolies; they must not be formed for that purpose ; they must not injure the trade of another by unjust methods ; competition must stop at all illegal methods of rivalry, and competition must not mean conspiracy.

— Joseph S. Aiterbach, "The Legal Aspect of Trusts," in The North American Kevie'd', September, 1899.

Anarchistic Crimes. — Through all the transformations of morality we can invariably detect a common fund of feelings that constitute the elementary moral sense of peoples that have reached the human or social plane, the indispensable soil for the complex and highest developments of virtue. These feelings, the exceptional absence of which characterizes the born criminal, and the exceptional violation of which con- stitutes crime in its primitive and typical form, may be said to be identical with the minimum of "pity" and "probity" presupposed by horror of bloodshed and by repugnance of theft. Without the existence of such a minimum of " pity " and " probity " in the average man, murder and theft, the most violent assertions of individual activity, would spread unchecked to the point of destroying the possibility of collective life. The so-called "political crime" is nothing but a variety of crime in its typical form of murder and theft, having as its impulsive suggestion a political thought or scheme of social refonn. This latter is not the crime, but the impulse to crime, finding its way into murder and theft through the action of degenerative causes — collective or individual

— which destroys the normal equilibrium of the moral type of man. Political crime, when involving murder or theft, differs from what is called common crime only in its motive. There is crime whenever there is perpetrated, for whatever purpose, an offense, in the form of murder or theft, against either of the two fundamental forms of the ethical sense.

In anarchistic crimes the political theory of anarchism is the initial suggestion to crime. Anarchism aims at the suppression of every form of "external" authority, the complete and direct abolition of classes and of political, economic, and social inequalities, through the wholesale destruction of the present framework of society — the demolition by all available means of existing social institutions. Between anarchistic dreams and insane delusions the boundary is almost imperceptible. This explains why anarchism is a sort of refuge for all intellectual d^class^s : it is a drain collecting the irreducible residuum of unassimilated minds, the waste product of social culture. The insistence of anarchism on the necessity of absolute freedom in the present condition of the great masses of the people is the cause of the transformation of the theory itself into a tremendous agency of criminality. The necessity of