Part 10

When the man finally withdrew, and the _Mudir_ after him, I was in no mood to go to bed. They had opened to me their ancient world, with all its poetry and mystery, and I did not want to lose it again. I could see it stretching dimly beyond the windows where the water-wheels went moaning under the moon. I went out into it. The night was--you have no idea what those nights could be. They had such a way of swallowing up the squalidness of things, and bringing out all their melancholy magic. The rose season was at its height, and the air was one perfume from the hidden gardens. Then the nightingales were at that heart-breaking music of theirs. And the moon! It wasn't one of those glaring round things, like a coachman's button or a butcher's boy with the mumps, by which young ladies are commonly put into spasms; but it was an old wasted one, with such a light!

It was all the more extraordinary because not a creature was about--except a man who lay asleep on the ground, not far from the door. Apparently they dropped off wherever they happened to be, down there, and I used to envy them for it. I stood still for a while, in the shadow of the house, taking it all in. Don't you know, it happens once in a while that you have a mood, and that your surroundings come up to it? It doesn't happen very often, either--at least, to workaday people like us. So I stood there, looking and listening and breathing. And when I saw the edge of the shadow of the house crumble up at one place, without any visible cause, and creep out into the moonlight, I--I only looked at it. Nothing had any visible cause in that strange world of mine, and I watched the slowly lengthening finger of shadow with the passivity of a man who has seen too many wonders to wonder any more. But then I made out a darker darkness winding back toward the house. And--I don't know--I thought of the man on the ground. I looked at him.

It was my camel-driver, dead as Darius, with the blood running out of a hole in his back like water out of a spout. For the moment I was still too far away from every day to be startled, or even very much surprised. It was only a part of that mysterious world, with its mysterious people and mysterious ways that I never could understand. What was he doing there dead, who had been so full of life a little while before? Was it one of his jokes? The night was the most enchanting you could imagine, the air was heady with the breath of rose-gardens, the nightingales were singing in the trees (down in the valley I heard, low, low, the weary water-wheels), and here was the prince of story-tellers with his tongue stopped forever, and the blood of him making a snaky black trail across the moonlight....

* * * * *

What happened next? My dear fellow, you remind me of these kids who will never let you finish their story! Nothing happened next. That was the beauty of it. I guess I got one pretty good case of the jim-jams after a while, and when I got through wondering whether I was going to be elected next, I began to wonder whether they wouldn't think I'd done it. Of course, I had done it, as a matter of fact, and that didn't tend to composure of mind. Neither did my speculations as to what the _Mudir_ might or might not have noticed when he left me that evening. But, if you will believe it, nobody ever lifted a finger. The next morning the caravan was gone and apparently everything was the same as before. If anything, they were more decent than before. That was the worst of it. I don't believe I'd have minded so much if they'd stoned me and ridden me out on a rail and set the Government after me and raised the devil generally. I should at least have felt less at sea. As it was--hello, there's Carmignani! Let's take him over to Tokatlian's.

THE UNREMEMBERED

FRAGMENTS OF A LOST MEMORY

BY FLORENCE WILKINSON

Where have they gone, the unremembered things, The hours, the faces, The trumpet-call, the wild boughs of white spring? Would I might pluck you from forbidden spaces, All ye, the vanished tenants of my places!

Stay but one moment, speak that I may hear, Swift passer-by! The wind of your strange garments in my ear Catches the heart like a belovèd cry From lips, alas, forgotten utterly.

An odour haunts, a colour in the mesh, A step that mounts the stair; Come to me, I would touch your living flesh-- Look how they disappear, ah, where, ah, where? Because I name them not, deaf to my prayer.

If I could only call them as I used, Each by his name! That violin--what ancient voice that mused! Yon is the hill, I see the beacon flame. My feet have found the road where once I came. Quick--but again the dark, darkness and shame.

THE BATTLE AGAINST THE SHERMAN LAW

HOW CAPITAL AND LABOR COMBINE TO SAFEGUARD THE TRUST AND LEGALIZE THE BOYCOTT

BY BURTON J. HENDRICK

ILLUSTRATED WITH PHOTOGRAPHS

Under the existing laws of the United States, it is a crime to organize a combination of individuals or corporations into a business aggregation in restraint of trade. It is likewise a crime for labor men or labor unions in different States to combine for the prosecution of certain aggressive enterprises popularly described as boycotts. Any person convicted of engaging in either of these prohibited acts may be fined not more than $5,000 for each offense, or imprisoned for one year at hard labor, or both.

According to reliable estimates, there are in the neighborhood of five hundred large trusts or combinations that daily violate this law. There are many thousands of smaller corporations and business firms that indulge in secret practices for which their officers may at any time be lodged in jail. As for the national prohibition of boycotts, labor organizations openly exist for the express purpose of conducting them. The constitution of the most powerful labor organization in this country, the Federation of Labor, specifically provides for engaging in this form of industrial warfare.

The statute that outlaws these combinations of both capital and labor is the famous Sherman Anti-trust Law. It is one of the briefest, most pointed, and most comprehensive measures ever passed by Congress. It contains only about seven hundred words and would fill less than a page of this magazine. In its first three lines, without any modifications or circumlocutions, it declares illegal "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." The next few lines provide the punishment, cited above, for breaking the law. The Sherman Act does not say that "some combinations" are illegal and criminal, but that "every" one is. It does not provide that certain offenders may be punished, but that "every" one "shall be." It leaves absolutely no discretion to prosecuting officers or to the courts. Within its comprehensive folds are gathered, on the one hand, the most commanding captains of industry and the greatest railroad magnates; and, on the other, the most insignificant puddlers in their furnaces and stokers on their trains.

The Sherman Act has thus established a community of interest between labor and capital which has had important practical results. Both capital and labor are openly evading the law. Both have many times been haled into court, convicted of infringing this statute, and enjoined from continuing in their illegal combinations. Both consequently find it an irksome impediment to their present plans and ambitions. In their active opposition to the law the two previously warring elements now meet on common ground.

The platform of the Republican party calls for amendments which, to all practical purposes, will seriously weaken the law, so far as its application to corporate combinations is concerned. The Democratic platform demands such changes as will exempt labor unions from its operation,--which is virtually the same thing as demanding the legalization of the boycott. At the last session of Congress the spectacle was presented of important labor unions and great corporation lawyers working hand in hand to this common end. Though this agitation failed for the time being, it may safely be asserted that the repeal or modification of the Sherman Act will continue to be a fixed article of the policy both of large aggregations of wealth and of large aggregations of labor. This fact makes important a study of its history and of its practical effects upon corporate and labor organizations.

_The Sherman Law Not Rushed Through Congress_

Hardly any important legislation has been so imperfectly understood or more persistently misrepresented. Although the law was passed only eighteen years ago, a large number of legends have already grown up about it. According to popular belief, the Sherman Anti-trust Act is an imperfect piece of legislation; a measure which was drawn up hastily, without thorough study or knowledge of the economic and social problems which it was intended to solve. The corporations declare that it was never intended to meet industrial conditions as they exist now: labor leaders have repeatedly asserted that the framers of the measure never intended that it should affect organizations of labor.

A study of the congressional debates which preceded the passage of the Sherman Act dissipates these misconceptions. The law was not rushed through Congress. It was seriously proposed as a carefully thought-out attempt to check great and clearly comprehended evils. In essence those evils did not differ from the ones which confront the American people today. In 1890 the trust, or the industrial combination, had almost reached its present state of development. Large aggregations of capital had already secured a monopoly of many of the necessaries of life. The Standard Oil Trust was then, as it is now, the most conspicuous of these combinations, and had already attained an unpopularity almost as great as it enjoys today; the Sugar Trust controlled practically the whole output of refined sugar. The Steel Trust, it is true, did not exist; but many combinations in steel products had already been formed. Combinations on steel rails dictated prices; nails, barbed fence wire, copper, lead, nickel, zinc, cordage, cottonseed oil,--all these products had already been brought largely under trust control. The Salt Trust and the Whiskey Trust had been organized. Combinations of railroads, for the purpose of fixing charges for transportation, had existed for twenty-five years. In 1875 Commodore Vanderbilt called the first great meeting of railroad trunk lines at Saratoga; and this conference adopted a "pooling" arrangement. The accumulated railroad abuses of a generation, especially this practice of "pooling" earnings, had led to the passage of the Interstate Commerce Act in 1887--three years before the enactment of the Sherman Law.

Other combinations, which disdained the name of trusts, but which had already developed certain points in common with them, also flourished. The labor union, for example, was in full flower. The Knights of Labor, under Powderly, had passed through many triumphant years; the Federation of Labor was firmly entrenched, and Samuel Gompers was its President then as he is today. The unions existed then, as they do now, to secure higher wages and greater advantages of employment for their members; and one of their weapons then, as it is at present, was the boycott. Organizations of farmers, which existed for a similar purpose--the Farmers' Alliance, the National League--had also reached a high state of development.

_Statesmen who Framed the Sherman Law_

Nor were the framers of this law inexperienced legislators who hastily scrambled together a measure to meet certain political exigencies. The men chiefly responsible for the anti-trust law were John Sherman of Ohio, George F. Edmunds of Vermont, George F. Hoar of Massachusetts, George Gray of Delaware, and James Z. George of Mississippi. Senator Spooner recently declared that no greater body of lawyers ever sat in Congress; no one would venture to contend that there is any similar group of five men in Washington today. John Sherman had served almost continuously in Congress since 1854; he had represented Ohio in the Senate throughout the Civil War and the reconstruction period, displaying especial talent in dealing with questions of national finance; and, as Secretary of the Treasury in President Hayes' cabinet, had carried through with masterly success the resumption of specie payments. George F. Edmunds was generally regarded as the greatest lawyer then in the Senate. Starting his career in that body in 1866, when Congress had to handle the intricate constitutional problems involved in the readmission of the Southern States, he immediately became one of an influential group of which the other members were Sumner, Fessenden, Trumbull, and Wade, and took an important part in framing the legislation of the reconstruction period. George F. Hoar had, by 1890, represented Massachusetts in the Senate for thirteen years; his great learning, his comprehensive knowledge of public questions, his independence, his genuine devotion to the best public interests had made him one of the most commanding figures in that body. George Gray of Delaware, at present a judge of the United States Circuit Court, and for many years one of the most conservative forces in the Democratic party--the same George Gray upon whom many of Mr. Bryan's opponents hoped to unite a few months ago as the Democratic presidential nominee--was also recognized as one of the Senate's greatest authorities on the Constitution. Senator George had served for many years as chief justice of the Supreme Court of Mississippi, and was the author and compiler of many works on law which are still widely used.

Over the question of federal control of large combinations these five men and their colleagues debated for nearly two years. Senator Sherman introduced his first anti-trust act August 14, 1888; the present statute finally became a law on July 21, 1890. During this period six separate trust bills, all modifications of that originally introduced by Mr. Sherman, were laid before the Senate. They were considered by two committees--the Finance and the Judiciary--and debated at great length in the committee of the whole. The discussions occupy one hundred and fifty pages of the Congressional Record.

A striking illustration of the general ignorance of the circumstances under which the Sherman Act was passed is furnished by the present Republican platform. This declares that "the Republican party passed the Sherman Anti-Trust Act over Democratic opposition." The records of Congress, however, show no indications of any opposition at all, Democratic or other. Of the five men most conspicuous in framing the law, three were Republicans and two were Democrats. In the Senate only one senator voted against the passage; in the House two hundred and forty-two votes were cast in favor of the act, and not a single one was cast against it. The whole debate was notable for its seriousness and its dignity; one or two Democrats did suggest that a revision of the tariff might help to curb the trusts; but that was the only partisan note struck. Congress keenly appreciated the issues raised by the trust problem and the necessity of taking action that would be beneficial and permanent. Everybody realized, also, the inherent difficulties of the situation. The debates in the Senate on this issue, far from indicating a scrappy investigation, furnish material for a liberal education in the constitutional questions involved in dealing with monopolies. Senator Hoar, in preparation for the work, studied the history of legislation concerning monopolies from the time of Zeno. One of the sections in the bill--that providing that a successful litigant against a trust can recover three times the damages suffered from it--Mr. Hoar incorporated from a statute on monopolies passed in the reign of James I.

_Sherman Act Intended to Apply to Labor Unions_

Of all the legends which have grown up about this law, perhaps the most absurd is that it was never intended to apply to workingmen. "As a matter of fact," said Samuel Gompers before the Judiciary Committee of the House last winter, "every man who now lives and is familiar with the legislation of the day knows that the Sherman Anti-trust Law was never intended to include organizations of labor," Chief Justice Fuller, in a recent decision of the United States Supreme Court, flatly contradicts Mr. Gompers' statement. "The records of Congress show," says Justice Fuller, "that several efforts were made to exempt, by legislation, organizations of farmers and laborers from the operation of the act and that all these efforts failed," In fact, the question of the relation of labor unions and the law occupied a conspicuous place in the debates; it was almost as constantly in the minds of the Senators as the question of capitalistic combinations themselves. To meet this situation, Senator Sherman introduced an amendment specifically excepting labor unions and agricultural associations from the operation of his statute. Mr. Gompers, according to his remarks before the Judiciary Committee last winter, was partly responsible for the introduction of this amendment. Senator Edmunds opposed it on the ground that it granted rights to labor which it withheld from capital, and he insisted that both sides should be treated upon an exact equality. In the following words he disposed for all time of Senator Sherman's plea for preferential treatment of laboring men:

The fact is that this matter of capital, as it is called, of business, and of labor, is an equation, and you cannot disturb one side of the equation without disturbing the other. If it costs for labor 50 per cent. more to produce a ton of iron, that 50 per cent. more goes into what that iron must sell for, or some part of it. I take it everybody will agree to that.

Very well. Now, if you say to one side of that equation, "You may make the value or the price of this iron by your combination for wages in the whole Republic or on the continent, but the man for whom you have made the iron shall not arrange with his neighbors as to the price they will sell it for, so as not to destroy each other," the whole business will certainly break, because the connection between the plant, as I will call it for short, and the labor that works that plant, is one that no legislation and no force in the world--and there is only one outside of the world that can do it--can possibly separate. They cannot be divorced. Neither speeches nor laws nor judgments of courts nor anything else can change it, and therefore I say that to provide on one side of that equation that there may be combination and on the other side that there shall not, is contrary to the very inherent principle upon which such business must depend. If we are to have equality, as we ought to have, if the combination on the one side is to be prohibited, the combination on the other side must be prohibited, or there will be certain destruction in the end....

On the one side you say that it is a crime and on the other side you say it is a valuable and proper under-taking. That will not do, Mr. President. You can not get on in that way. It is impossible to separate them; and the principle of it therefore is that if one side, no matter which it is, is authorized to combine, the other side must be authorized to combine, or the thing will break and there will be universal bankruptcy. That is what it will come to.

Senator Edmunds' logic absolutely killed any attempt to place capital and labor upon different footings, Instead of adopting this proposed amendment, the Senate referred the whole question of trust legislation to the Judiciary Committee, of which Senator Edmunds was chairman. Mr. Edmunds and his colleagues threw into the waste basket all the pending trust bills and their amendments and struck out on new lines. As a consequence, Senator Edmunds became the chief author of the Sherman Anti-Trust Law. His most active associates, were Senator Hoar and Senator George. The one man who had practically nothing to do with the statute as it stands to-day was Senator Sherman himself. He played an important part in the preliminary discussion and in framing the measures which served as a basis for this discussion; but the bill as it was finally adopted by Congress bore little resemblance to his. The amendment upon which he laid especial stress--that of exempting laboring and agricultural organizations from the operation of the Anti-trust Law--was absolutely ignored.

As finally adopted, the act did not prohibit labor unions per se or combinations of labor unions formed to accomplish lawful ends; it did, however, strike at certain labor union practices. That this was the clear intention of the Senate is evident from a statement made by Senator Edmunds in a newspaper interview as far back as 1892. "The Sherman Law," said Mr. Edmunds, "is intended to cover and I think will cover every form of combination that seeks in any way to interfere with or restrain free competition, whether it be capital in the form of trusts, combinations, railroad pools, or agreements, or labor through the form of boycotting organizations that say a man shall not earn his bread unless he joins this or that society. Both are wrong; both are crimes and indictable under the Anti-trust Law."

_Unsuccessful Efforts to Destroy the Law_

For eighteen years the anti-trust statute has represented American policy and American law in federal regulation of combinations in restraint of trade. In that period the act has been repeatedly assailed from many legal standpoints. It has been passed upon more than two hundred and fifty times by the federal courts, and has been considered fifty-five times by the United States Supreme Court. The greatest constitutional lawyers of this generation--such men as Edward J. Phelps, James C. Carter, John F. Dillon, and Francis Lynde Stetson--have attempted to destroy it and have not succeeded. The greatest railroads and corporations, on the one hand, and the largest and most influential labor unions, on the other, have both failed in their attempts to secure exemption from its operation.