the Attorney-General, Mr. Knox, and through him, I ordered proceedings to be instituted for the dissolution of the company.  As far as could be told by their utterances at the time, among all the great lawyers in the United States Mr. Knox was the only one who believed that this action could be sustained.  The defense was based expressly on the ground that the Supreme Court in the Knight case had explicitly sanctioned the formation of such a company as the Northern Securities Company.  The representatives of privilege intimated, and sometimes asserted outright, that in directing the action to be brought I had shown a lack of respect for the Supreme Court, which had already decided the question at issue by a vote of eight to one.  Mr. Justice White, then on the Court and now Chief Justice, set forth the position that the two cases were in principle identical with incontrovertible logic.  In giving the views of the dissenting minority on the action I had brought, he said: 

“The parallel between the two cases [the Knight case and the Northern Securities case] is complete.  The one corporation acquired the stock of other and competing corporations in exchange for its own.  It was conceded for the purposes of the case, that in doing so monopoly had been brought about in the refining of sugar, that the sugar to be produced was likely to become the subject of interstate commerce, and indeed that part of it would certainly become so.  But the power of Congress was decided not to extend to the subject, because the ownership of the stock in the corporations was not itself commerce.”

Mr. Justice White was entirely correct in this statement.  The cases were parallel.  It was necessary to reverse the Knight case in the interests of the people against monopoly and privilege just as it had been necessary to reverse the Dred Scott case in the interest of the people against slavery and privilege; just as later it became necessary to reverse the New York Bakeshop case in the interest of the people against that form of monopolistic privilege which put human rights below property rights where wage workers were concerned.

By a vote of five to four the Supreme Court reversed its decision in the Knight case, and in the Northern Securities case sustained the Government.  The power to deal with industrial monopoly and suppress it and to control and regulate combinations, of which the Knight case had deprived the Federal Government, was thus restored to it by the Northern Securities case.  After this later decision was rendered, suits were brought by my direction against the American Tobacco Company and the Standard Oil Company.  Both were adjudged criminal conspiracies, and their dissolution ordered.  The Knight case was finally overthrown.  The vicious doctrine it embodied no longer remains as an obstacle to obstruct the pathway of justice when it assails monopoly.  Messrs. Knox, Moody, and Bonaparte, who successively occupied the position of Attorney-General under me, were profound lawyers and fearless and able men; and they completely established the newer and more wholesome doctrine under which the Federal Government may now deal with monopolistic combinations and conspiracies.