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The Green Bag

ensued justify the inference that the intention existed to use the power of the

isolatedly viewed, we are not considering,

by which numbers of persons, whether

combination as a vantage ground to

manufacturers,

further monopolize the trade in tobacco by means of trade conﬂicts designed to

ployees, were required to bind them

injure others, either by driving com

petitors out of the business or compelling them to become parties to a combina tion-—a purpose whose execution was

illustrated by the plug war which ensued and its results; by the snuﬂ‘ war which followed and its results and by the conflict which immediately followed the

entry of the combination into England and the division of the world's business by the two foreign contracts which

ensued; by the ever-present mani festation which is exhibited of a con scious wrongdoing; by the form in

stockholders.

or

em

selves, generally for long periods, not to compete in the future.

“Indeed, when the results of the un disputed proof which we have stated are fully apprehended, and the wrongful acts which they exhibit are considered, there comes inevitably to the mind the conviction that it was the danger which it was deemed would arise to individual liberty and the public wellbeing from acts

like those which this record exhibits which led the legislative mind to con ceive and to enact the Anti-Trust act, considerations which also serve to so clearly demonstrate that the combina

the various transactions were

tion here assailed is within the law

embodied from the beginning, ever changing but ever in substance the

as to leave no doubt that it is our plain

which

same, now the organization of a new

company, now the control exerted by the taking of stock in one or another

duty to apply its prohibitions." The Court thus devoted some atten

or in several, so as to obscure the result actually attained, nevertheless uniform,

tion to the subject of trade wars, eﬁ dently treating them as an improper and illegal method of acquiring the monopoly of a business, and took

in their manifestations of the purpose

occasion to condemn methods “ruth

to restrain others and to monopolize

lessly carried out upon the assumption that to work upon the fears or play upon the cupidity of competitors would make success possible."

and retain power in the hands of the few who, it would seem, from the beginning contemplated the mastery of the trade which practically followed;

by the gradual absorption of control over all the elements essential to the successful manufacture of tobacco pro

ducts, and placing such control in the hands of seemingly independent cor

porations, serving as perpetual barriers to the entry of others into the tobacco

trade; by persistent expenditure of millions upon millions of dollars in buying out plants, not for the purpose of utilizing them, but in order to close them up and render them useless for the purposes of trade; by the constantly recurring stipulations, whose legality,

The reasoning of this decision, much more clearly than that of the Standard Oil

judgment,

makes

it

reasonably

evident and probable, not to say certain, that a monopoly which has been built up by the normal methods of free com petition, without any intimidation of competitors by price-cutting or threats to ruin their business and without any acquisition of control by appeals to their greed for excessive capitalization and proﬁts, is outside the prohibitions of the Sherman Act. This decision has thus tended to remove much of the vague ness of the general prohibition of “ab