COMMON WEAKNESS IN BILLS

In his address last night on "Pending Legislation regarding Combinations and Corporations," Professor E. Dana Durand declared that with one exception, all the bills relative to the trust question now before Congress have a common weakness in their failure to distinguish between harmless and monopolistic combination. These bills would rule out the element of reason in the judicial interpretation of trust cases, thus making no discrimination between the petty and harmless restraint of trade allowable by late decisions of the Supreme Court, and the large and detrimental monopolies by the more powerful corporations. Such acts would do little toward bettering the situation. The prevention of mere combination is not the solution, and what is really needed is the prevention of harmful trade restraint. None of the proposed legislation would improve on the Sherman Anti-Trust Law, the wording of which Professor Durand considers remarkably simple in its all-inclusiveness.

The one bill now before Congress which really attains a point of legislative and economic excellence is the one which provides for an Inter-State Trade Commission, which is designed to help enforce the Sherman Act. The proposed commission would require annual reports from all corporations having capitals of $5,000,000 or more, and from any others which might be so directed. The commission would have no strong direct powers, but the suggestions made in its own annual report to Congress would doubtless have great weight, and would go far toward carrying out the letter of the law.

Although it is acknowledged that there are good points in the pending legislation, yet, considering the fact that the so-called "trust evil" is far smaller than it was ten years ago, we can well afford to rely wholly on the present laws, and devote the attention of our legislators not to additions thereto, but to the means of more thoroughly carrying them out.