Mindful of the agricultural interest, ever dear to the heart of Jefferson’s followers, the Democrats supplemented the reserve law by the Farm Loan Act of 1916, creating federal agencies to lend money on farm mortgages at moderate rates of interest.  Within a year $20,000,000 had been lent to farmers, the heaviest borrowing being in nine Western and Southern states, with Texas in the lead.

=Anti-trust Legislation.=—­The tariff and currency laws were followed by three significant measures relative to trusts.  Rejecting utterly the Progressive doctrine of government regulation, President Wilson announced that it was the purpose of the Democrats “to destroy monopoly and maintain competition as the only effective instrument of business liberty.”  The first step in this direction, the Clayton Anti-trust Act, carried into great detail the Sherman law of 1890 forbidding and penalizing combinations in restraint of interstate and foreign trade.  In every line it revealed a determined effort to tear apart the great trusts and to put all business on a competitive basis.  Its terms were reinforced in the same year by a law creating a Federal Trade Commission empowered to inquire into the methods of corporations and lodge complaints against concerns “using any unfair method of competition.”  In only one respect was the severity of the Democratic policy relaxed.  An act of 1918 provided that the Sherman law should not apply to companies engaged in export trade, the purpose being to encourage large corporations to enter foreign commerce.

The effect of this whole body of anti-trust legislation, in spite of much labor on it, remained problematical.  Very few combinations were dissolved as a result of it.  Startling investigations were made into alleged abuses on the part of trusts; but it could hardly be said that huge business concerns had lost any of their predominance in American industry.

=Labor Legislation.=—­By no mere coincidence, the Clayton Anti-trust law of 1914 made many concessions to organized labor.  It declared that “the labor of a human being is not a commodity or an article of commerce,” and it exempted unions from prosecution as “combinations in restraint of trade.”  It likewise defined and limited the uses which the federal courts might make of injunctions in labor disputes and guaranteed trial by jury to those guilty of disobedience (see p. 581).

The Clayton law was followed the next year by the Seamen’s Act giving greater liberty of contract to American sailors and requiring an improvement of living conditions on shipboard.  This was such a drastic law that shipowners declared themselves unable to meet foreign competition under its terms, owing to the low labor standards of other countries.

Still more extraordinary than the Seamen’s Act was the Adamson law of 1916 fixing a standard eight-hour work-day for trainmen on railroads—­a measure wrung from Congress under a threat of a great strike by the four Railway Brotherhoods.  This act, viewed by union leaders as a triumph, called forth a bitter denunciation of “trade union domination,” but it was easier to criticize than to find another solution of the problem.