INTIMIDATION BY FINES

representatives to frame an anti-trust law or a railroad rate law after popular dis cussion and agitation than for the courts to interfere? The Massachusetts legislature has recently passed statutes to preserve the open market1 and the Supreme Court has upheld them.2 When an alleged right is on the border line of damnum absque injuria, when the precedents for judicial inter ference are slim and the theory of the law is admittedly in a "nebulous" stage, when all the learning and research of counsel and court together cannot unearth a precedent for judicial action fifty years old although labor unions are centuries old, when the question is of general public interest of which the legislature properly could take cognizance and with which it will certainly be asked to deal, why should the court interfere? 1 St. 1901 c. 478; R. L. c. 56 s. i. St. 1907 c. 469. 2 Comm. v. Strauss, 191 Mass. 545. the Justices, 193 Mass. 605.

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We must not forget that the Willcutt case we have been discussing was a case of a lawful strike by an orderly body of men, that no question of breach of contract with the employer was involved and that the only authority outside the state to sustain the court is a common law action in Vermont based on considerably different facts.1 The Willcutt case cannot be the last word on the subject, even in Massachusetts. The court must go forward or back. The apparent conflict between the majority and Mr. Justice Loring on the question whether a union in the same situation as that presented in the Willcutt case can expel a member and charge him a fee for reinstatement may well be the next ques tion to come before the court. BOSTON, MASS., November, 1908.

Opinion of 1 Boutwell v. Marr, 71 Vt. i.