* Autobiography (Scribner), pp. 424-25.


When Roosevelt became President, there were three directions in
which energy needed to be applied to the solution of the trust
problem: in the more vigorous enforcement of the laws already on
the statute books; in the enactment of necessary new laws on
various phases of the subject; and in the arousing of an
intelligent and militant public opinion in relation to the whole
question. To each of these purposes the new President applied
himself with characteristic vigor.

The Sherman Anti-Trust law, which had already been on the Federal
statute books for eleven years, forbade "combinations in
restraint of trade" in the field of interstate commerce. During
three administrations, eighteen actions had been brought by the
Government for its enforcement. At the opening of the twentieth
century it was a grave question whether the Sherman law was of
any real efficacy in preventing the evils that arose from
unregulated combination in business. A decision of the United
States Supreme Court, rendered in 1895 in the so-called Knight
case, against the American Sugar Refining Company, had, in the
general belief, taken the teeth out of the Sherman law. In the
words of Mr. Taft, "The effect of the decision in the Knight case
upon the popular mind, and indeed upon Congress as well, was to
discourage hope that the statute could be used to accomplish its
manifest purpose and curb the great industrial trusts which, by
the acquisition of all or a large percentage of the plants
engaged in the manufacture of a commodity, by the dismantling of