sts of the world always want the courts.
They let you have the members of the Legislature, and the Aldermen and
the Constable, if they can have the judges.

And so in England the judges by their decisions tied the working man
hand and foot until he was a criminal if he did anything but work, as
many people think he is today. He actually was at that time, until
finally Parliament, through the revolution of the people, repealed all
these laws that judges had made, wiped them all out of existence, and
did, for a time at least, leave the working man free; and then they
began to organize, and it has gone on to that extent in England today,
that labor organizations are as firmly established as Parliament
itself. Much better established there than here.

We in this country got our early laws from England. We took pretty
much everything that was bad from England and left most that was good.
(Applause). At first, when labor organizations were started they had a
fair chance; they were left comparatively free; but when they began to
grow the American judges got busy. They got busy with injunctions,
with conspiracy laws, and there was scarcely anything that a labor
organization could do that was not an industrial conspiracy.

Congress took a hand, not against labor; but to illustrate what I said
about the difference between making a law and telling what the law
means, we might refer to the act which was considered a great law at
the time of its passage, a law defining conspiracy and combinations in
reference to trade, the Sherman anti-trust law. In the meantime, the
combinations of capital had grown so large that even respectable
people began to be afraid of them, farmers and others who never learn
anything until everybody else has forgotten it (laughter); they began
to be afraid of them. They found the great industrial organizations of
the country controlling everything they used. One powerful
organization owned all the oil there was in the United States; another
handful of men owned all the anthracite coal there was in the United
States; a few men owned all the iron mines in the United States; and
the people began to be alarmed about it. And so they passed a law
punishing conspiracies against trade. The father of the law was
Senator Sherman of Ohio. The law was debated long in Congress and the
Senate. Every man spoke of it as a law against the trusts and
monopolies, conspiracies in restraint of trade and commerce. Every
newspa