might make, enacted positively that no such violence, and no intimidation, and no such molesting, and no obstructing should take place. And by that section of the Act of Parliament, to which the attention of the court has been directed, it is provided, that if any person shall, by violence to the person or property, or by threats or intimidation, or by molesting or in any way obstructing another, force or endeavor to force, any journeyman, manufacturer, workman or other person hired or employed in any manufacture, trade or business to depart from his hiring, employment or work, or to return his work before the same shall be finished; or to prevent, or endeavor to prevent, any journeyman, manufacturer, workman or other person, not being hired or employed, from hiring himself, or from accepting work or employment from any person or persons, therefore, by either of these means, to persuade and endeavor to force any person to leave his employment, or to prevent any person from entering into employment which he would otherwise have been willing to enter into, or by violence or intimidation or molesting, to force, or endeavor to force, any manufacturer or person carrying on trade or business, to make any alteration in his mode of regulating, managing, conducting or carrying on such manufacture, every person so offending or aiding, or abetting or assisting therein, shall be imprisoned for any time not exceeding three calendar months." 1 In the leading American case, Reg. v. Rowlands, 5 Cox Cr. Cas. 466, 490. "We are dealing in this case with common rights. Every man, be he capitalist, merchant, employer, laborer or professional man, is entitled to invest his capital, to carry on his business, to bestow his labor, or to exercise his calling, if within the law, according to his pleasure. Generally speaking, if, in the exercise of such a right by one, another suffers a loss, he has no ground of action. Thus, if two merchants are in the same business in the same place, and the business of one is injured by the competition, the loss is caused by the other's pursuing his lawful right to carry on business as seems best to him. In this legitimate clash of common rights, the loss which is suffered is damnum absque injuria. So it may reduce the employer's profits that his workmen will not work at former prices, and that he is obliged to pay on a higher scale of wages. The loss which he sustains, if it can be called such, arises merely from the exercise of the the English doctrine is upheld. The rule is stated by the court, as follows: "I take it, then, a combination is criminal wherever the act to be done has a necessary tendency to prejudice the public or to oppress individuals by unjustly workman's lawful right to work for such wages as he chooses, and to get as high a rate as he can. It is caused by the workman, but it gives no right of action. Again, if a workman is called upon to work with the material of a certain dealer, and it is of such a character as either to make his labor greater than that sold by another, or is hurtful to the person using it, or for any other reason is not satisfactory to the workman, he may lawfully notify his employers of his objection, and refuse to work it. The loss of the material-man in his sales caused by such action of the workman is not a legal injury, and not the subject of action. And so it may be said that in these respects what one workman may do many may do, and many may combine to do without giving the sufferer any right of action against those who cause his loss. But on this common ground of common rights, where every one is lawfully struggling for the mastery, and where losses suffered must be borne, there are losses willfully caused to one by another in the exercise of what otherwise would be a lawful right, from simple motives of malice. fuse to work for him, except on better terms, at a time when their withdrawal will cause great loss to him, and they intentionally inflict such loss to coerce him to come to their terms, they are bona fide exercising their lawful rights to dispose of their labor for the purpose of lawful gain. But the dealings between P Bros. and their materialmen, or between such materialmen and their customers, had not the remotest natural connection either with defendants' wages or their terms of employment. There was no competition or possible contractual relation between plaintiffs and defendants, where their interests were naturally opposed. The right of the plaintiffs to sell their material was not one which, in its exercise, brought them into legitimate conflict with the rights of defendants to dispose of their labor as they chose. The conflict was brought about by the effort of defendants to use plaintiffs' right of trade to injure P Bros., and upon failure of this to use plaintiffs' customers right of trade to injure plaintiffs. Such effort cannot be in the bona fide exercise of trade, is without just cause, and is, therefore, malicious. The immediate motive of defendants here was to show to the building world what punishment and disaster necessarily followed a defiance of their demands. The remote motive of wishing to better their condition by the power so acquired, will not, as we think we have shown, make any legal justification for defend subjecting them to the power of the confederates, and giving effect to the the purposes of the latter, whether of extortion or mischief. According to this view of the law a combination of employers to depress the wages of journeymen below what they would be, if there was no recurrence to artificial means by either side, is criminal. There is between the different parts of the body politic a reciprocity of action on each other, which, like the action of antagonizing muscles in the natural body, not only prescribe to each its appropriate state and condition, but regulates the motion of the whole. The effort of an individual to disturb this equilibrium can never be perceptible, nor carry the operation of his interest on that of any other individual, beyond ants' acts." Moores v. Bricklayers' competition; but he has a right to cent the limits of fair competition; but the increase of power by combination of means, being in geometrical proportion to the number concerned, any association may be able to give an impulse, not only oppressive to individuals, but mischievous to the public at large; and it is the employment of an engine so powerful and dangerous that gives criminality to an act that would be perfectly innocent, at least in a legal view when done by an individual. The combination of capital for purposes of commerce, or to carry on any other branch of industry, although it may in its consequences indirectly operate on third persons, is unaffected by this consideration, because it is a common means in the ordinary course of human affairs, which stimulates to competition and enables men to engage in undertakings too weighty for an individual. It would, I grant, be impossible for the employers in any branch of manufactures to produce a permanent depression of wages, because others would find it to their interest to embark in the business on more liberal terms; and these, by a just compensation for labor, would have a monopoly of all the journeymen, they would ultimately ruin those who should adhere to the system of depression. The competition of interest must eventually break up every combination of the kind. But though every plan of coercion must recoil on those who put it in practice, it may occasion much temporary mischief to others. The journeymen are compelled to enter, with their employers, into 'the unprofitable contest of who can do the most harm,' or submit to work for such prices as the latter may choose to give. Hence, precisely the same oppressive consequences to the community from a confederacy among the bakers to extort an exorbitant price for bread, which everyone will acknowledge to be indictable. The laboring classes purchase their bread with their labor, or, what is the same thing, they give their labor for the money with which they purchase bread, and it is evident the more labor is depreciated, the more of it will be required to purchase any given quantity of bread. It must be evident, therefore, that an association is criminal where its object is to depress the price of labor below what it would bring, if it were left without artificial excitement by either masters or journeymen, to take its chance in the market. But the motive may also be as important to avoid, as to induce an inference of criminality. The mere act of combining to change the price of labor is, perhaps, evidence of impropriety of intention, but not conclusive; for if the accused can show that the object was not to give an undue value to labor, but to foil their antagonists in an attempt to assign to it, by surreptitious means, a value which it would not otherwise have, they will make out a good defense." The agreement of two or more employers to discharge their employes, or to refuse or to neglect to employ other men in the place of those discharged, or who had abandoned their service in order to create a prejudice against a trades union or to secure public sympathy, is an unlawful conspiracy.2 § 105. The Boycott.—The boycott, as it is ordinarily conducted, is an attempt on the part of striking or discharged employes to interrupt or to prevent the public 1 Commonwealth V. Carlisle, otherwise would not have been disBright, 36, 41. 2 Of this form of conspiracy, Judge Grosscup, in a charge to the grand jury in United States v. Debs, 63 Fed. Rep. 436, says: "If two or more men, no matter what their position in the railroad company may have been, wrongfully and corruptly agreed among themselves, either for the purpose of creating public sympathy in a threatened strike, or for any other purpose, that they would cause the mail trains and trains carrying interstate commerce to be stopped, and did acts in pursuance of that agreement, they are guilty of conspiracy. If two or more agreed wrongfully and corruptly among themselves that, for the purpose of creating public sympathy in this strike, they would discharge men from their employ who men charged, intending that such discharge should stop the running of the mail or interstate commerce trains, and thereby raise public indignation, they would be guilty of conspiracy. If two or more men, in view of a threatened strike, agreed wrongfully and corruptly that they would not employ men to take the places of the men who had quitted the service, but would allow the trains to stand still for the sake, merely, of creating publie sympathy or indignation against the strikers, they would be guilty of conspiracy, unless the circumstances and situations were such that the employment of new men, reasonably viewed, would lead to danger to those men, or danger to the railroad property, or danger to any public interest." |