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The Green Bag

suffle this and that duty within the limits of a state is an invitation to set up a national power to the exclusion, the ultimate exclusion, of state power. The idea that we require differing qualities of our statesmen, our executive officials, our legislators, and our judges, is to a certain extent, perhaps, oldfashioned. Mr. Root is himself a living object-lesson of the good to be attained by selecting for one of these high posi tions a complete, versatile, sagacious lawyer, who with almost equal distinc tion, probably, would apply the force of his intellect to the duties of any public position which he might be called upon to fill. MR. KEIR HARDIE'S RETORT Mr. Keir Hardie, M. P., the Scotchman who went to Parliament in a flannel shirt, who differs from John Burns in working for reforms through the Labor party, of which he is chairman, instead of the Liberal party, and who shocked the London Times by his speeches in which he said he would do his best to help India become self-governing like Canada, got into a slight dispute about a question of labor law with Hon. Charles E. Littlefield, ex-Congressman from Maine, at a dinner of the Economic Club given in New York January 18. The Green Bag is indebted to a friendly correspondent who attended the dinner for an account of the episode, which seems to have been due to a misunder standing with regard to the meaning of the Trade Disputes Act of 1906. Mr. Littlefield had delivered an elo quent as well as well-informed speech on what he understood the labor organi zation could and could not do, especially pointing out that the boycott and black list, two methods formerly used by the American Federation of Labor, had been specifically declared illegal.

Then Mr. Hardie started out to say that in England matters had progressed much further, and that by a recent statute, labor organizations had been taken out of the purview of the common law. Mr. Littlefield interrupted with the inquiry whether Mr. Hardie referred to the statute of 1906. Mr. Hardie—"Yes, I refer to that." Mr. Littlefield —"Well, it is my under standing, Mr. Hardie, that that statute applies simply to the question of dam ages, and does not affect in any way the criminal law in relation to labor organi zations." Mr. Hardie (turning his back on Mr. Littlefield)— 'As an English M. P., I might be permitted to say that I know the law of Great Britain." Mr. Littlefield—"I know to the con trary." Mr. Hardie—"You may know the contrary, but you don't know the Act!"

MENDING THE SHERMAN LAW It is perhaps just as well that the Warner or Civic Federation Bill to amend the Sherman anti-trust law by a system of voluntary registration was adversely reported upon by the Senate Committee on the Judiciary. It pro posed giving the executive a discretion, in determining what combinations are consistent with public policy, and what are opposed to it, which is properly vested in courts of law rather than in the executive branch of the government. Nevertheless, Senator Nelson of the committee, though right in his opposi tion to granting the head of a bureau the "dispensing power" once exercised by the British crown, went too far when he declared that all combinations in restraint of trade, whether reasonable or unreasonable, should be prohibited. He made bold to assert that the injec