to those preceding, as an attempt to fill up the gaps left by former attempts to eradicate the evil. When it had been demonstrated that a particular statute was ineffectual, a new act would be passed, and when, by some cunning ingenuity, this law would in its turn be evaded or rendered ineffective, another statute broader in its scope and usually more drastic in its penalties would be the response of the Legislature. Hence each succeeding act includes within its provisions some element which had hitherto escaped mention in the previous statutes. Viewed as an entity this broadening of the law by succeeding enactments indicates the growth of combinations within the state, and also the nation; shows the attempts of legislation to keep pace with the growth of the evil; and above all demonstrates the ineffectiveness of Nebraska anti-trust laws to remedy the injury legislated against. For whether we single out any particular act and consider its effects apart from the general legislation upon the subject, or whether we consider the effects of the whole series of statutes as one connected system, in either case our verdict is that Nebraska anti-trust legislation has not served its purpose. But very few cases have been prosecuted under the law and of the total of these, but one has resulted in the granting of a positive remedy, the injunction against some of the members of the Nebraska Grain Dealers' Association. Even here the remedy was not complete. Enacted to demolish all trusts and monopolistic combinations and associations the statutes have in fact been directed only against combinations of middlemen, because Nebraska has no serious "trust problem." Directed against these combinations of middlemen, the law in its application has but attacked their form, has but driven them to more secret and cunning methods, and left intact their substance, because the law has failed to destroy the means by which they exist. We therefore raise the query: would it not have been far better to have amended the corporation laws of the state so as to have provided for more publicity in the affairs of corporations and associations, and then when evils arose to have relied upon the weapons of the common law, unblunted by the imperfections and constitutional defects of inflexible statutory enactments based on political dogma of over a century ago? CHAPTER IV Conclusions From the foregoing discussion of the history and effects of anti-trust legislation in Iowa and Nebraska certain conclusions necessarily follow. In the first place the legislation in its scope, and judged by its application, greatly exaggerated the seriousness of the problem of industrial concentration. In the passage of each act, the class or party dominant in the legislature, oppressed, perhaps, by a particular grievance requiring regulation, but cognizant of the rapid development of capitalistic concentration in the nation, and influenced more by the harmful possibilities of this development than by local realities, actuated more by sentiment or politics than by sober comprehension of the real problem, saw in the modern trust and combination a Cyclopian monster, wholly bad, that must therefore be destroyed. To that end the legislation was enacted, whether or no such combinations existed in the particular state. While Iowa apparently needed no law she passed a general statute covering the whole field. While Nebraska at most needed but a law dealing with combinations of grainmen and of lumber and coal dealers, she passed the general Act of 1889 and then in 1897 passed a |