[Footnote 1:  Continental Wall Paper Co. v.  Voight, 212 U.S. 227.]

There are special statutes in Kansas, Nebraska, and North Dakota against trusts in certain lines of business, as, for instance, the buying or selling of live-stock or grain of any kind.

In the twenty years that have elapsed since this early legislation there has been considerable clarifying in the legislative mind; modern statutes, and especially constitutional provisions, stating the offence much more concisely, with a simple reliance upon the common law, leaving it, in other words, for the courts to define.  The Southern State constitutions generally enact that the legislatures shall enact laws to prevent trusts.  New Hampshire says:  “Full and fair competition in the trades and industries is an inherent and essential right of the people, and should be protected against all monopolies and conspiracies which tend to hinder or destroy.”  Oklahoma provides that “the legislature shall define what is an unlawful combination, monopoly, trust, act, or agreement, in restraint of trade, and enact laws to punish persons engaged in any unlawful combination, monopoly, trust, act, or agreement, in restraint of trade, or composing any such monopoly, trust, or combination.”  In Wyoming, monopolies and perpetuities, in South Dakota and Washington, monopolies and trusts, are “contrary to the genius of a free State and should not be allowed.”  The constitutional provisions of North Dakota, Minnesota, and Utah are again a mere repetition of the common law.  The New Hampshire statute grants “all just power ... to the general court to enact laws to prevent operations within the State of ... trusts ...,” or the operations of persons and corporations who “endeavor to raise the price of any article of commerce or to destroy free and fair competition ... through conspiracy, monopoly or any other unfair means to control and regulate the acts of all such persons.”  This last clause, though a clear statement of the common law, would, of course, render hopeless Mr. Gompers’s crusade in favor of the boycott, the object of a boycott invariably being to control the acts of somebody else.  Alabama directs the legislature to provide for the prohibition of trusts, etc., so as to prevent them from making scarce articles of necessity, trade, or commerce, increasing unreasonably the cost thereof, or preventing reasonable competition; and to much the same effect in Louisiana.

We may well close this brief survey by a study of the volume of such legislation.  We have, for instance, in 1890, seven anti-trust laws; in 1891, six; in 1892, one; in 1893, eight.  In 1894, doubtless as a consequence of the panic, anti-trust legislation absolutely ceased, and in 1895 there is only one law, passed by the State of Texas, its old law having been declared unconstitutional.  In 1896, under the influence of President Cleveland’s administration, we find four such statutes, and in 1897, with reviving