the Attorney-General, Mr. Knox, and through him, I ordered proceedings
to be instituted for the dissolution of the company. As far as could be
told by their utterances at the time, among all the great lawyers in the
United States Mr. Knox was the only one who believed that this action
could be sustained. The defense was based expressly on the ground that
the Supreme Court in the Knight case had explicitly sanctioned the
formation of such a company as the Northern Securities Company. The
representatives of privilege intimated, and sometimes asserted outright,
that in directing the action to be brought I had shown a lack of respect
for the Supreme Court, which had already decided the question at issue
by a vote of eight to one. Mr. Justice White, then on the Court and
now Chief Justice, set forth the position that the two cases were in
principle identical with incontrovertible logic. In giving the views of
the dissenting minority on the action I had brought, he said:

"The parallel between the two cases [the Knight case and the Northern
Securities case] is complete. The one corporation acquired the stock
of other and competing corporations in exchange for its own. It was
conceded for the purposes of the case, that in doing so monopoly had
been brought about in the refining of sugar, that the sugar to be
produced was likely to become the subject of interstate commerce, and
indeed that part of it would certainly become so. But the power of
Congress was decided not to extend to the subject, because the ownership
of the stock in the corporations was not itself commerce."

Mr. Justice White was entirely correct in this statement. The cases were
parallel. It was necessary to reverse the Knight case in the interests
of the people against monopoly and privilege just as it had been
necessary to reverse the Dred Scott case in the interest of the people
against slavery and privilege; just as later it became necessary to
reverse the New York Bakeshop case in the interest of the people
against that form of monopolistic privilege which put human rights below
property rights where wage workers were concerned.

By a vote of five to four the Supreme Court reversed its decision in
the Knight case, and in the Northern Securities case sustained the
Government. The power to deal with industrial monopoly and suppress it
and to control and regulate combinations, of which the Knight case had
deprived the Federal Government, was thus restored t