trade, etc., below a common standard figure, or to keep the price at a fixed or graduated figure, or to preclude free or unrestricted competition among themselves or others, or to pool or unite any interest.  To much the same effect is the statute of South Dakota (1890, 154, 1), but it also denounces any combination which tends to advance the price to the consumer of any article beyond the reasonable cost of production or manufacture.  The Louisiana (1890, 36) and New Mexico laws (1891, 10) are aimed particularly at attempts to monopolize, while the Oklahoma statute (6620) was aimed only at corporations, and the broad wording of the Federal act passed this year should be noted:  “Every contract, combination, in the form of trust or otherwise, or conspiracy in restraint of trade or commerce among the several States or with foreign nations, is hereby declared to be illegal” (U.S., 1890, 647, 1); and in the second section:  “Every person who shall monopolize, or attempt to monopolize, or combine or conspire with any other person or persons to monopolize, any part of the trade or commerce among the several States, or with foreign nations, shall be deemed guilty under this act.”  And in the third section:  “Every person who shall make any such contract, or engage in any such combination or conspiracy, shall be deemed guilty of a misdemeanor.”  The rest of the legislation provides penalties, manner, and machinery for the enforcement of these laws by prosecuting attorneys, etc., with a usual allowance to informants; and it may be here noted that one great trouble has resulted from this machinery, for it provided injunction remedies and dissolution, which may well be too severe a penalty, and, furthermore, dispenses with a jury and throws unnecessarily upon the court—­even now, as in the Standard Oil case, a distant high court of appeal—­the burden of determining a complicated and voluminous mass of fact.  Our ancestors never would have suffered such matters to be adjudged by the Chancellor!

South Dakota has an extraordinary statute making the agents for agricultural implements, etc., guilty of a criminal offence when their principals refuse to sell at wholesale prices to dealers in the State (S.D., 1890, 154, 2).  But beside these remedies, there is a frequent statute dating from the earliest Kansas act of 1889, that debts for goods sold by a so-called trust, contracts made in violation of the law, will not be enforced in favor of the offending person or corporation.  That is to say, the person buying the goods of a trust may simply refuse to pay for them; and the constitutionality of this legislation has recently been sustained by a divided opinion in the Supreme Court of the United States.[1] The possession or ownership of trust certificates is in some States made criminal.  Corporations offending against the statute are to have their charters taken away, or, if chartered in other States, to be expelled from the State.  All contracts or agreements in violation of any of these statutes are, of course, made void.