_intent_. The _effect_ (often proposed as the test) is
really immaterial as determining the illegality of the combination,
except so far as it may be evidence of the probable intention of the
participators at its inception.

[Footnote 1: Professor Dicey, I find, in his recent book, "Law and
Opinion in England," opens this subject with a statement equally
strong (Appendix, note 1, pp. 465-6).]

For the early English conspiracies were by no means necessarily or
usually aimed at the commission of some definite crime; they were
rather described to be the conspiracies of great lords for the general
"oppression" of a weaker neighbor, for which he sought refuge or
protection in the court of chancery. Now, general oppression or
wrongdoing, the exclusion from land or labor or property or trade,
by a powerful combination, is precisely the moral injury suffered in
modern boycotts when there is no actual crime committed. Indeed, one
of the earliest kinds of conspiracy expressly mentioned and described
in the English statutes is a conspiracy for the maintenance of
lawsuits, which by the very definition of the thing must be a
combination for an end not in itself unlawful. The American courts
have been curiously obscure or vacillating on this point. With their
too general forgetfulness of historical legislation and the early
common law, they have gone from one extreme to the other, often with
a trivial consideration of the importance of the points involved, and
always with an entire absence of a universal point of view, of that
genius which grasps a question in its entirety and is not confused by
irrelevant details. It is only of late when the matter has come before
the Federal Supreme Court and the courts of a few States which have
been educated by a frequent recurrence of disputes of this sort that
we begin again to see the principle clearly, as I shall venture to lay
it down here: that the acts of a number of persons combined are to
be judged by their _intent_. In individual acts the intent is of no
importance except as it turns an accident into a crime; chance-medley
for instance into murder, or mere asportation into larceny, or
ordinary conversation into slander; yet these few instances serve to
show how universal is the recognition of intent in the law and how
little difficulty it presents. Juries have very rarely any difficulty
in determining this question of intent in individual acts; and in
like manner they will have no di