tutional mode of examination. For a chancery court is not equipped with a jury. Hence where it assumes to adjudicate subjects outside of the domain of its jurisdiction, jury trial falls, not because it has gone outside of its sphere as to the subject, but because it has retreated into its sphere as to the procedure. This is all that can be made out of a refusal of a jury trial in contempt proceedings. It is rare dissimulation which countenances a theft of jurisdiction on one hand, but insists upon the other hand in a strict regard for the jurisdictional method of dealing with the subject matter after the theft. The man who stole meat but refused to eat it on Friday is the analogue of the chancery court which denies a jury trial of a charge of disobeying a labor injunction, on the ground that a jury trial is not an adjunct of a chancery court.

Now as to the subject-matter of the extraordinary injunctions resorted to by the chancery courts in the last decade it must never be forgotten that it is purely economic. Between the employer and the employe the essential question is economic. The employer wants labor cheap; the employe wants it dear. The conflict between these desires is an aspect of industrial competition. When these desires cannot be compromised into harmony the result is a strike. We then have the following history of things preceding the issuance of a labor injunction: First a dissatisfaction on the part of the laborers with their wages or terms of employment, which may be well or ill founded; second, a simultaneous quitting by the laborers of their employment; third, some of these

laborers go into the streets, in behalf of all, to notify other men who would take the places deserted that there is a strike and why it was resorted to, and to circulate hand-bills requesting men not to take the old places and thus break the strike. There may be clashes on the street resulting from all the countless circumstances which attend a time of inflamed feelings. And fourth, the employer either cannot get any help, or can get so little help that his business is stopped. Now, to analyze the character of these acts it is obvious that no law forbids any man from being dissatisfied with his terms of employment, whether he does so reasonably or unreasonably. No law forbids a man or body of men from quitting their work either singly or in a body. No law prevents men from being in the streets. No law prevents them from talking, or from circulating hand-bills which contain no malicious defamation. So far then every act done is legal. If these men resort to violence or crime of any sort then they are amenable to a good many different laws-but only in a criminal court and not in a court of chancery. But the labor injunction which follows upon the development of the foregoing conditions gathers under its inhibition two general classes of acts. It forbids the commission of crimes and torts because they injure the employer's business. The injury to business is coupled with the crime to dodge the law already referred to that the chancery courts have no jurisdiction over crimes. It forbids the doing of innocent acts like talking, circulating hand-bills and being on the street, because they are said to be the component acts of a conspiracy to injure the em

ployer's business. Thus innocent acts are interdicted; thus conspiracies are interdicted; although conspiracies are crimes of which, as shown, a court of chancery has no jurisdiction. And so innocent acts are interdicted because they relate to the commission of a crime-the alleged conspiracy-and the crime-the alleged conspiracy-is interdicted because it injures business. This is precisely the sort of juggling that the patrons of the Star Chamber employed.

But does the fact that a crime injures business furnish legal warrant for enjoining its commission? Burglary, larceny, arson, forgery, cheating, counterfeiting and many other crimes injure business just as much as a strike does; and yet no one pretends that these crimes can be enjoined by a court of chancery. Such a pretense violently incurs the organic law which has thrown about every man charged with crime the right to have it specifically set out in an indictment; to meet the witnesses face to face, and to have the question of fact of his guilt or innocence passed upon by a jury. But if a court of chancery enjoin the crime and some one is supposed to have committed it the chancery court insists upon trying the man charged upon affidavits and without a jury. Hence courts of chancery either have no power to enjoin such things, or having enjoined them must proceed in dealing with them according to the constitution relating to such subjects. If courts of chancery cannot in dealing with such things afford indictments, witnesses and juries then it cannot have power to deal with them at all; because the constitution provides for an indictment, for confrontation of the witnesses and for jury trial

in the most absolute terms. And to say that a court of chancery may enjoin crimes which injure business, is to say that it has jurisdiction of all crimes against the rights of property and of all crimes which indirectly affect property rights, which is absurd. No one carries the argument that far. For if it should be carried that far then the criminal courts would yield to the chancery courts, and the constitution would be so palpably nullified that no one could be befooled on the subject. So then, to recapitulate, the chancery courts have no power over crimes of themselves; they have no power over crimes because they injure business, for the incident of injury to business. is not distinctive of those acts prohibited by labor injunctions, but pertains to many crimes and wrongs; and therefore nothing has been added to the crime itself which gives the chancery court power over it. On this point the defender of labor injunctions must either show that the offenses prohibited by labor injunctions are peculiar in their injury to business or property interests; or he must admit that such injury flows from a great variety of offenses and so be carried by the force of the admission to the manifest absurdity of asserting that the chancery court may enjoin burglary, larceny, swindling and other crimes. This dilemma leads the defender of the labor injunction to say that while the vitality of the injunction depends upon the theory that the act enjoined is a crime, still that the court does not punish one who has violated a labor injunction for a crime, but for disobedience of the injunction of the court. That is, if men are enjoined from prosecuting a conspiracy and are found

guilty of having done so, the court in fining and imprisoning them does so not for having prosecuted the conspiracy but for having prosecuted the conspiracy in disobedience of the court's order. Usurpation and hypocrisy have never been more thinly veiled. A punishment in contempt proceedings for having violated a labor injunction must be either for having done a wrongful act, or for having done a wrongful act in disobedience of a court's inhibition. For an act which is meritorious or lawful can be done by any one in spite of a court's inhibition not to do it. If the court should seek to punish one for doing a meritorious or a lawful act a complete defense to the prosecution would be that the act was lawful or meritorious; and the court could not punish for mere disobedience of an order forbidding the doing of such lawful or meritorious act. No one can deny that if a court has forbidden what the law does not forbid it should and must expect to be contemned. So that as no injunction is worth while unless lawful punishment can be inflicted for disobeying it, the injunction must forbid something which the law forbids, such as the crime of conspiracy. Now if conspiracy were a meritorious thing it would, as shown, be useless to enjoin it, for if it were enjoined it might be done with impunity. It is because conspiracy is wrong that the general law of contempt can be argued to warrant summary punishment where a conspiracy is carried on in the face of an injunction. Is the punishment for the disobedience of the injunction? This cannot be true. Because the doing of a legal act, though enjoined, cannot be punished as a contempt. Therefore