Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: they had always regarded monopolies as contrary to the spirit and policy of the common law. The principal evils which led to public outcry against monopolies and to the final denial of the power to make them were the power which the monopoly gave to the one who enjoyed it to fix the price and thereby injure the public; the power which it engendered of enabling a limitation on production; and the danger of deterioration in quality of the monopolized article which it was deemed was the inevitable resultant of the monopolistic control over its production and sale. Monopolies were also thought to tend toward the impoverishment of labor.18 In the famous Case of the Monopolies Sir Edward Coke declared that a grant from the crown of a monopoly was void at common law as being incompatible with the English constitution, and this ruling was subsequently adopted by the statute of monopolies, which declared prior monopoly grants void and no longer of effect, and regulated the right of the crown to create them for the future.14 But though monopolies by grant came thus to be regarded as unlawful, it is remarkable that nowhere at common law can there be found a prohibition against the creation of a monopoly as such by an individual. However, as it was considered, at least so far as the necessaries of life were concerned, that individuals by the abuse of their right to contract might be able to usurp the power arbitrarily to enhance prices, one of the wrongs arising from monopoly, it came to be that laws were passed relating to offenses such as forestalling, regrating and engrossing by which prohibitions were placed upon the power of individuals to deal under such circumstances and conditions as to give rise to the presumption of an intent to injure others through the means, for instance, of a...