Before going into the details of anti-trust legislation, it would be well to sketch its history on the broadest possible lines.  Legislation began first in the States some years before the Federal Anti-trust Law, or Sherman Act, first enacted in 1890.  These earlier statutes, including the Sherman Act itself, made illegal all contracts or combinations between persons or corporations in restraint of trade; and their direct result was to compel the formation of the gigantic modern trust as we now understand it.  Had the Sherman Act, instead of being called “An Act to Protect Trade and Commerce Against Unlawful Restraints and Monopolies,” been entitled “An Act to Compel the Formation of Large Trusts by all Persons Engaged in Similar Lines of Business,” it would have been far more correctly described in its title.  For whereas, before this act persons or corporations could make contracts or arrangements among themselves which were good and valid working agreements unless so clearly monopolistic as to be held unreasonable restraint of trade at the common law (which, indeed, so far as I know, was never done in any American court), after the Sherman Act was passed all such contracts, combinations, or arrangements, even when reasonable and proper, were made illegal and criminal.  The only escape, therefore, was to bring all such persons and corporations in the same trade together in one corporation, and this is precisely what we now term a trust.  Before 1890, in other words, a trust was really an agreement, a combination of individuals or corporations usually resting upon an actual deed of trust under which the constituent parties surrendered their property or the control of their property to a central board of trustees; since 1890 this kind of trust has practically disappeared and been replaced by the single large corporation, either a holding company which holds the stock of all constituent companies, or under still more modern practice, because more likely to stand the scrutiny of the courts, a huge corporation, with a charter given by the liberal laws of New Jersey, West Virginia, or other State, which actually holds, directly, all the properties and business of the constituent corporations or persons.  The modern question, therefore, has become really the question of the large corporation, its regulation and its control; further complicated, of course, by the fact that hitherto there has been no power to control such large corporations except the very State which creates them, which is usually quite indifferent to their acts so long as they pay the corporation tax.  It is therefore a question not only of the large corporation, but of the powers of the States over each other’s corporations and of the Federal government over all.  Until the Northern Securities case, it was probably supposed that a corporation, being an individual, could not be guilty of a criminal conspiracy, and consequently could not in itself offend against the anti-trust acts.  That case, and more recent decisions still, show a disposition of the courts to look behind the screen of the fictitious entity of the corporation to the merits and demerits of the persons making it up, and the objects with which they came together and the methods they continued to use.