were at once abandoned. Second, that the new company has besides acquired control of eight additional concerns, the business of such concerns being now carried on by four separate corporations, all absolutely controlled by the American Tobacco Company, although the connection as to two of these companies with that corporation was long and persistently denied. Thus reaching the end of the second period and coming to the time of the bringing of the suit, brevity prevents us from stopping to portray the difference between the condition in 1890 when the (old) American Tobacco Company was organized by the consolidation of five competing cigarette concerns and that which existed at the commencement of the suit. That situation and the vast power which the principal and accessory corporate defendants and the small number of individuals who own a majority of the common stock of the new American Tobacco Company exert over the marketing of tobacco as a raw product, its manufacture, its marketing when manufactured, and its consequent movement in the channels of interstate commerce indeed relatively over foreign commerce, and the commerce of the whole world, in the raw and manufactured products stand out in such bold relief from the undisputed facts which have been stated as to lead us to pass at once to the second fundamental proposition which we are required to consider. That is, the construction of the Anti-trust Act and the application of the act as rightly construed to the situation as proven in consequence of having determined the ultimate and final inferences properly deducible from the undisputed facts which we have stated. The construction and application of the Anti-trust Act. If the Anti-trust Act is applicable to the entire situation here presented and is adequate to afford complete relief for the evils which the United States insists that situation presents it can only be because that law will be given a Opinion of the Court. 221 U.S. more comprehensive application than has been affixed to it in any previous decision. This will be the case because the undisputed facts as we have stated them involve questions as to the operation of the Anti-trust Act not hitherto presented in any case. Thus, even if the ownership of stock by the American Tobacco Company in the accessory and subsidiary companies and the ownership of stock in any of those companies among themselves were held, as was decided in United States v. Standard Oil Co., to be a violation of the act and all relations resulting from such stock ownership were therefore set aside, the question would yet remain whether the principal defendant, the American Tobacco Company, and the five accessory defendants, even when divested of their stock ownership in other corporations, by virtue of the power which they would continue to possess, even although thus stripped, would amount to a violation of both the first and second sections of the act. Again, if it were held that the corporations, the existence whereof was due to a combination between such companies and other companies was a violation of the act, the question would remain whether such of the companies as did not owe their existence and power to combinations but whose power alone arose from the exercise of the right to acquire and own property would be amenable to the prohibitions of the act. Yet further: Even if this proposition was held in the affirmative the question would remain whether the principal defendant, the American Tobacco Company, when stripped of its stock ownership, would be in and of itself within the prohibitions of the act although that company was organized and took being before the Anti-trust Act was passed. Still further, the question would yet remain whether particular corporations which, when bereft of the power which they possessed as resulting from stock ownership, although they were not inherently possessed of a sufficient residuum of power to cause them to be in 221 U.S. Opinion of the Court. and of themselves either a restraint of trade or a monopolization or an attempt to monopolize, should nevertheless be restrained because of their intimate connection and association with other corporations found to be within the prohibitions of the act. The necessity of relief as to all these aspects, we think, seemed to the Government so essential, and the difficulty of giving to the act such a comprehensive and coherent construction as would be adequate to enable it to meet the entire situation, led to what appears to us to be in their essence a resort to methods of construction not compatible one with the other. And the same apparent conflict is presented by the views of the act taken by the defendants when their contentions are accurately tested. Thus the Government, for the purpose of fixing the illegal character of the original combination which organized the old American Tobacco Company, asserts that the illegal character of the combination is plainly shown because the combination was brought about to stay the progress of a flagrant and ruinous trade war. In other words, the contention is that as the act forbids every contract, and combination, it hence prohibits a reasonable and just agreement made for the purpose of ending a trade war. But as thus construing the act by the rule of the letter which kills, would necessarily operate to take out of the reach of the act some one of the accessory and many subsidiary corporations, the existence of which depend not at all upon combination or agreement or contract, but upon mere purchases of property, it is insisted in many forms of argument that the rule of construction to be applied must be the spirit and intent of the act and therefore its prohibitions must be held to extend to acts even if not within the literal terms of the statute if they are within its spirit because done with an intent to bring about the harinful results which it was the purpose of the statute to prohibit. So as to the defendants. While it is argued on the one hand that the forms by which various properties VOL. CCXXI-12 were acquired in view of the letter of the act exclude many of the assailed transactions from condemnation, it is yet urged that giving to the act the broad construction which it should rightfully receive, whatever may be the form, no condemnation should follow, because, looking at the case as a whole, every act assailed is shown to have been but a legitimate and lawful result of the exertion of honest business methods brought into play for the purpose of advancing trade instead of with the object of obstructing and restraining the same. But the difficulties which arise, from the complexity of the particular dealings which are here involved and the situation which they produce, we think grows out of a plain misconception of both the letter and spirit of the Anti-trust Act. We say of the letter, because while seeking by a narrow rule of the letter to include things which it is deemed would otherwise be excluded, the contention really destroys the great purpose of the act, since it renders it impossible to apply the law to a multitude of wrongful acts, which would come within the scope of its remedial purposes by resort to a reasonable construction, although they would not be within its reach by a too narrow and unreasonable adherence to the strict letter. This must be the case unless it be possible in reason to say that for the purpose of including one class of acts which would not otherwise be embraced a literal construction although in conflict with reason must be applied and for the purpose of including other acts which would not otherwise be embraced a reasonable construction must be resorted to. That is to say two conflicting rules of construction must at one and the same time be applied and adhered to. The obscurity and resulting uncertainty however, is now but an abstraction because it has been removed by the consideration which we have given quite recently to the construction of the Anti-trust Act in the Standard Oil Case. In that case it was held, without departing from any previous decision of the court that as the statute had not defined the words restraint of trade, it became necessary to construe those words, a duty which could only be discharged by a resort to reason. We say the doctrine thus stated was in accord with all the previous decisions of this court, despite the fact that the contrary view was sometimes erroneously attributed to some of the expressions used in two prior decisions (the Trans-Missouri Freight Association and Joint. Traffic cases, 166 U. S. 290, and 171 U. S. 505). That such view was a mistaken one was fully pointed out in the Standard Oil Case and is additionally shown by a passage in the opinion in the Joint Traffic Case as follows (171 U. S. 568): "The act of Congress must have a reasonable construction, or else there would scarcely be an agreement or contract among business men that could not be said to have, indirectly or remotely, some bearing on interstate commerce, and possibly to restrain it." Applying the rule of reason to the construction of the statute, it was held in the Standard Oil Case that as the words "restraint of trade" at common law and in the law of this country at the time of the adoption of the Anti-trust Act only embraced acts or contracts or agreements or combinations which operated to the prejudice of the public interests by unduly restricting competition or unduly obstructing the due course of trade or which, either because of their inherent nature or effect or because of the evident purpose of the acts, etc., injuriously restrained trade, that the words as used in the statute were designed to have and did have but a like significance. It was therefore pointed out that the stat-❤ ute did not forbid or restrain the power to make normal and usual contracts to further trade by resorting to all normal methods, whether by agreement or otherwise, to accomplish such purpose. In other words, it was held, not that acts which the statute prohibited could be removed from the control of its prohibitions by a finding |