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 The Green Bag

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such combination would destroy rea sonably competitive conditions in inter state commerce. . ..

“A decision following the supposed authority of the Sugar Trust case and

manufacturers and sellers of an article of interstate commerce surely would not be accepted by the people of the United States as a ﬁnal solution of the trust problem. Such a decision would prob

holding that the Anti-Trust Act does

ably result in an imperative popular de

not prevent the effective monopolization of interstate trade or commerce by com

mand for legislation of a socialistic character and possibly it might lead

bining or vesting in a corporation the

to an tion."

plants and businesses of practically all

amendment

of

the Constitu

What Is a “Republican Form of Government”? THE opponents of the popular initia tive and referendum are fond of asserting that those measures are incon

sistent with the clause of the federal Constitution guaranteeing a "republican form of government” to citizens of the United States.

The meaning of the

phrase “a republican form of govern ment” will doubtless be settled, ulti

mately, in accordance with the political convictions of the American people, whether they come to favor the con servative form of representative govern

ment or to substitute for it the newer direct form of popular control. We have doubts whether the Supreme Court will ever construe the phrase in its nar rower signiﬁcation. One of the "Notes” in the Harvard Law Review recently threw much light on this interesting question.‘ To quote:— “The Latin res publica, at least as late as the sixteenth century, was altogether colorless as to the form of government

it designated.

The compound adjective

is not found in classical ‘or mediaeval

Latin. The noun ‘republic’ and the adjective ‘republican’ were used by Wil son, the author of the clause in its ﬁnal form, and by other publicists of the time 124 Harvard Law Review, 141 (Dec.).

in a sense broad enough to include direct

democracy. The same thing is true of the use of the corresponding French words re'publigue and re'publicain by Montesquieu and apparently by Rous

seau, the writings of both of whom had a great influence on American political thought of that period. The political party which advocated keeping the gov ernment as close to the people as possible was called, shortly after the formation

of the Constitution, the Republican party. On the other hand, Madison deﬁnes a republic as ‘a government in which the scheme of representation takes

place,’ and contrasts it with a pure democracy.

Discussion of the clause

under consideration in the constitutional convention indicates that it was directed against insurrection, invasion and monar chical forms. "The state governments in existence in 1787 must be taken as examples of the republican form, in the sense in which that phrase is used in the Con stitution. In spite of the fact that the referendum appears in the formation of some of the state constitutions and in spite of the existence of the New Eng land town government, so close a student of political science as Hamilton believed that the state governments were then