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7. "A Nation of Villagers,"
- University of Wisconsin Press
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7 "A Nation of Villagers" -Bernard Shaw It has been said that no trust could have been created without breaking the law. Neither could astronomy in the time of Galileo. If you build up foolish laws and insist that invention is a crime, well-then it is a crime. That is undeniably true, but not very interesting. Of course, you can't possibly treat the trusts as crimes. First of all, nobody knows what the trust laws mean. The spectacle of an enlightened people trying in vain for twenty-five years to find out the intention of a statute that it has enacted-that is one of those episodes that only madmen can appreciate. You see, it is possible to sympathize with the difficulties of a scholar trying to decipher the hieroglyphics of some ancient people, but when statesmen can't read the things they've written themselves, it begins to look as if some imp had been playing pranks. The men who rule this country to-day were all alive, and presumably sane, when the Sherman Act was passed. They all say in public that it is a great piece of legislation-an "exquisite instrument" someone called it the other day. The highest paid legal intelligence has concentrated on the Act. The Supreme Court has interpreted it many times, ending with the enormous assumption that reason had something to do with the law.l The Supreme Court was denounced for this: the reformers said that if there was any 'In Standard Oil Co. v. United States, 221 u.s. 1 (1911), Chief Justice Edward D. White enunciated the "rule of reason"; the Sherman Act, he insisted, prohib· ited only unreasonable restraints of trade. 77 "A NATION OF VILLAGERS" reason in the law, the devil himself had got hold of it. As I write, Congress is engaged in trying to define what it thinks it means by the Act. ...2 That uncertainty hasn't prevented a mass of indictments, injunctions , lawsuits. It has, if anything, invited them. But of course, you can't enforce the criminal law against every "unfair" business practice. Just try to imagine the standing army of inspectors, detectives, prosecutors, and judges, the city of courthouses and jails, the enormous costs, and the unremitting zeal-if you cannot see the folly, at least see the impossibility of the method. To work with it seriously would not only bring business to a standstill , it would drain the energy of America more thoroughly than the bitterest foreign war. Visualize life in America, if you can, when the government at Washington and forty-eight state governments really undertook not our present desultory pecking, but a systematic enforcement of the criminal law. The newspapers would enjoy it for a week, and everybody would be excited; in two weeks it would be a bore; in six, there would be such a revolt that everyone, radical and conservative, would be ready to wreck the government and hang the attorney-general. For these "criminal" practices are so deep in the texture of our lives; they affect so many, their results are so intimate that anything like a "surgical" cutting at evil would come close to killing the patient. If the anti-trust people really grasped the full meaning of what they said, and if they really had the power or the courage to do what they propose, they would be engaged in one of the most destructive agitations that America has known. They would be breaking up the beginning of a collective organization, thwarting the possibility of cooperation, and insisting upon submitting industry to the wasteful, the planless scramble of little profiteers. They would make impossible any deliberate and constructive use of our natural resources, they would thwart any effort to form the great industries into coordinated services, they would preserve commercialism as the undisputed master of our lives, they would lay a premium on the strategy of industrial war,-they would, if they could. For these anti-trust people have never seen the pos- "Congress's attempt to redefine the anti-trust law resulted in the enactment· of the Clayton law on October 15, 1914. [54.226.242.26] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 12:40 GMT) •• A NATION OF VILLAGERS" sibilities of organized industries. They have seen only the obvious evils, the birth-pains, the undisciplined strut of youth, the bad manners, the greed, and the trickery. The trusts have been ruthless , of course. No one tried to guide them; they have...