IX. THE LAW OF TRADE COMBINATIONS. THE proximity into which men are now brought, and the almost bewildering ease with which they can communicate with one another, have given a strong impulse in business to the principle of combination. Combination is the motto of modern commerce. More and more is it apparent that industry will in the future be mainly in the hands of associated bodies. On the one side vast companies and amalgamations of companies quarter out the field in which capital circulates; on the other Trade Unions numbering members in thousands and tens of thousands organize and regulate labour. Already companies have practically absorbed the great operations of Land Transport and Fire and Life Insurance; soon Banking will pass also under their sway. The Salt Union, the United Alkali Company, and the proposed Coal Trust mark the advance in this country alone of ideas of even vaster enterprise. Yet outside the serried ranks of these great associations there yet exist a large though perhaps a diminishing number of individual capitalists and a still larger and probably not diminishing number of individual workmen. Combined capital, guided by salaried managers, measures its long purse and its long arms against the individual proprietor operating in a narrower area, but with more concentrated energy. Combined labour, strong in the discipline of the trade union, confronts the single craftsman, and brings irresistible pressure to bear on him, if he ventures to resist its authority. The interests of labour and capital, to those most nearly concerned, appear only too often to be divergent and furnish ample material for misunderstanding. It will be at once seen that there are here the conditions of conflict. This conflict has none of the decorative aspects of war and is waged for no trophy of chivalry. The prizes striven for are common material things, but the struggle for commercial supremacy is a bitter one, and it is easy for the combatants to overstep the limits of order and the boundaries of the peace. To keep the peace is obviously the primary function of law, and law has thus been always concerned in restraining industrial combatants from any semblance of physical violence. But English law has not confined itself to this modest task. Combinations, especially combinations of labour, inspired such terror among our forefathers that, from the middle of the fourteenth century to the reign of George IV, we find statute after statute prescribing penalties upon all alliances and covines of workmen to alter wages, while the laws against forestalling, regrating, engrossing, and monopolies, coupled with the developed law of conspiracy, confined combinations of capitalists within rigid limits 1. These statutes which are out of harmony with modern ideas were deemed by their authors to be in accordance with sound principle, and with the well-known doctrine of English Common Law, that every person has individually and the public collectively a right to require that trade shall be kept free from unreasonable obstruction. But it is obvious that the word 'unreasonable' gives an elasticity to this legal doctrine of which the changing opinion of successive generations has taken full advantage, and indeed a full description of its fortunes would illustrate a very curious and interesting chapter in the history of economic opinion in this country. For it is natural that legal theories as to restraint of trade should fare very differently at the hands of mediaeval lawyers keenly alive to the necessity of securing supply in times when A learned writer has recently given good reason for asserting that Christianity was persecuted not as a religion but as an association, and that the Roman Empire was opposed to all associations whatever with the sole exception of Benefit Clubs. The Church in the Roman Empire, pp. 354-360. Ramsay. |