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Combinations in Canada.

Canada is among the last emergences of embryonic Nations.

She is an inheritor of all that has preceded in the Paternal Countries from which her people have generated. Their great constitutional events, especially those of Great Britain, are of vital import to every Canadian.

Our Constitution is a reflection, if not of the exact form at all events of the spirit of the Constitution of the United Kingdom. The Laws of England are the root element of the Laws of every Province of Canada except Quebec.

We must keep our eye on the bulwarks and battlements of our freedom and liberty, for this is an epoch of ruthless inconoclasts who merely obey an infatuation in demolishing an old institution, to make room for a new one while utterly oblivious of or indifferent to the question whether the new is a route to progress or to retrogression. The new is not necessarily the best either in Law or in Religion, or in Constitutional Government.

Our guidance to the right must come from the reflections of the past into the future. Midway we always are though constantly advancing from the one into the other

In the 19th century it was the individual man that had risen to the surface after the terrible convulsions which shattered and submerged oligarchical governments and transformed our Parent Country from an aristocracy of birth and lineage with the people largely

as obedient serfs into one of the most democratic of Nations.

Yet here we are no more than entering the 20th century, with the ideal consummation attained, than we in Canada a young people and a new Nation-are being rapidly remoulded into combinations of trade, commerce and politics which are designed to stifle the individual man and enthrone craft and chicanery and Mistress Manipulation as the dominators and dictators of our lives.

Our country groans under the whole superimposition; and man from being a potent factor has become an ignoble cypher. The manacles are on his hands, and the gyves on his feet clasped and fastened by these abominable combinations.

Are they legal?

That is a question eminently for the Lawyer.

It is said that a combination is legal as long as its object is not unlawful.

This is one of those dangerous generalities in which rhetoric delights but which Law contemns. At least the Law should contemn them. But I fear that instead of doing so it succumbs to their sophistical glamour, and combinations which are base, and sordid and contra bonos mores escape disintegration in consequence.

Any combination which entrenches upon the absolute freedom of the individual is, I say, illegal, according to the Common Law of the Land; and if the Common Law exhibits any deficiency or any inadaptability to the multiform combinations which control and dominate us-the Legislatures of the country, Dominion as well as Provincial, ought to supply whatever is needed to make our Law effective.

It is their emphatic work; and the individual is their constituent, and not combinations which arrogate to themselves the right of expressing the Volens of its members, or at all events the Volens of the majority of its members in defiance of dissenters and in defiance

of the free rights of those affected by their determinations.

By means of combinations an altogether artificial existence has been created all over this country.

Freedom of trade and freedom of contract are completely lost. No man can live to-day his own life, just as he likes, and as he could have done even 5 years ago.

The cost of everything that is essential to life is controlled by combinations.

The earth has not contracted in that time, nor has it diminished or ceased to yield its produce. The population is very nearly stationary. There is and can be no scarcity, but yet famine prices prevail for everything.

It is combinations which have brought this about and not individuals. The War, a prolific parent of combination inventions, suggested to the avaricious genius of certain men that prices might be foisted to scarcity pitch. Combinations were promptly formed to accomplish the infernal project. It was distinctly a crime against the State, and was punishable as such. Few of the general public knew whether there was a scarcity or not, such was the benumbing effect of the continual din of the war cries for year after year.

For a time these combinations got lee-way; and now they have installed themselves definitely as part of—as masters of-not only our body politic, of our marts and markets, of our manufacturers and trades, but also of the life of each individual man.

The condition is an abomination; and it cannot be legal in a free country where the right of the individual man is sacred.

It is not I say, weakness in our Laws, even as they stand.

Our Common Law prohibits any number of men combining together to compel another to submit to their will.

Can a number of men combine to fix an extortionate price of a commodity necessary to life and to refuse to sell it at a lower price?

The answer made to this is that the combines does not compel any one to buy. It only says if he buys he must pay the extortionate price. But if the commodity is by the combine made unprocurable unless at the price, what is the effect or result of the combination but to carry out an act of extortion?

The principle of this is in no way lessened if the combine fixes merely a price not necessarily extortionate but in such a way as to make a monopoly and destroy the freedom of contract to acquire a necessary commodity at the best price possible.

In one case the combine directly effects an extortion.

In the other it indirectly does the same thing by destroying the inalienable Civil Right of Freedom of Contract the right to buy in the cheapest market which no combination can legally monopolize or make exclusive.

Surely to destroy a man's Civil Right—his right of a free competitive contractor-is as much a criminal offence as to destroy his property.

There is no difference in principle between extorting money and extorting a price which is not fixed by competition but by combination. Duress is behind

both; and robbery is the result of both.

The offence is within the Common Law of England; and if there is any doubt as to its being within our Criminal Code, let the Parliament of Canada remove the doubt and make it specifically a criminal offence.

It does not forebode well to Canada that a Commission is appointed to investigate and report whether prices fixed by combines are fair or not. That is what I call dickering with the devil.

The combination to fix a price at all, whether fair or unfair, is an impairment of the free right of competitive contract, and as such should be by the criminal law prohibited, and made a crime on the part of every one concerned in carrying it out whether as principal or as employe; and where the principal

concerned is a corporation a heavy money fine should be imposed followed, if there is a continuance of the offence, by a mandatory sequestration and a peremptory cancellation of the charter of the corporation.

Silk gloves in handling ruffianism smack too much. of a sham fight which, in spite of a display of pugilism, inevitably results in both antagonists coming out of the melee unscathed.

There is no sham in the extortion of the combinations all around us, from the combinations of the cafes and the hucksters right up through all the gradients to those of the wholesalers and the manufacturers; and the mailed fist and not silk gloves is what must be applied by the only guardians we possess of our liberties and lives-the Parliament of Canada and the Legislatures of the Provinces, each in its sphere-unless they mean openly to avow their abandonment of the individual to the ravening wolves of extortion and fraud.

Law Making.

Law making in Canada has followed the trend of mechanical contrivances in speed as well as in volume of production. Nearly every Province turns out more law each year than does the United Kingdom itself whose Parliament not only legislates for three distinct Nations but for vast dependencies over the world excluding the reckoning altogether of its occasional legislation for the self-governing parts of the Empire.

The Imperial Parliament sits, with brief adjournments at certain seasons of the year, almost continuously. But the Parliament of Canada and the Legislatures of the provinces take only spasmodic turns at the Law making machine; and these are preceded by a display of preparatory verbosity which is astounding -bewildering I should say and comparable with nothing that I know of except a magnified brawling shop of fishwives to whom the legend ascribes the faculty of perpetual speech-the spontaneous clatter of endless words.