was notified, with threats, not to haul them; employees of the trucking company and of customers were incited to strike in order to prevent both hauling and installation; repair shops were notified not to repair them; union men were coerced by threats of the loss of their union cards and of being blacklisted as "scabs" if they assisted in installing them; an exposition company was threatened with a strike, if it allowed them to be exhibited, etc., etc.,—all of which seriously interfered with the interstate trade of the manufacturer and caused great loss to its business. Held, a combination and conspiracy to restrain interstate commerce against which the manufacturer was entitled to relief by injunction under the Sherman Act, as amended by the Clayton Act. Pp. 461 et seq.

3. A conspiracy is a combination of two or more by concerted action to accomplish an unlawful purpose or to accomplish a purpose not in itself unlawful by unlawful means. If the purpose be unlawful, it may not be carried out by means otherwise lawful; and although it be lawful, it may not be carried out by means that are unlawful. P. 465.

4. A "secondary boycott" is a combination not merely to refrain from dealing with the person aimed at, or to advise or by peaceful means persuade his customers to refrain, but to exercise coercive pressure upon such customers, actual or prospective, in order to cause them to withhold or withdraw patronage through fear of loss or damage to themselves. P. 466.

5. In determining the right to an injunction under the Clayton and Sherman Acts, the legality or illegality of a boycott under the common law or under the statutes of a particular State is of minor consequence, since the acts of Congress are paramount in their field and must be given full, independent effect. P. 466.

6. It is settled by decisions of this court that a restraint of interstate commerce produced by peaceable persuasion violates the Sherman Act, and is not justified by the fact that the participants in the combination or conspiracy have an object beneficial to themselves or their associates which they might have been at liberty to pursue in the absence of the statute. P. 468.

7. Section 6 of the Clayton Act, in declaring that nothing in the antitrust laws shall be construed to forbid the existence and operation of labor organizations or to forbid their members from lawfully carrying out the legitimate objects thereof, and that such organizations or their members shall not be construed to be illegal combinations or conspiracies in restraint of trade, assumes that the normal objects of such organizations are legitimate, but contains nothing

to exempt them or their members from accountability when they depart from objects that are normal and legitimate and engage in an actual combination or conspiracy in restraint of trade. It does not authorize any activity otherwise unlawful, or enable a normally lawful organization to cloak such an illegal combination or conspiracy. P. 468.

8. The first paragraph of § 20 of the Clayton Act-which provides that injunctions shall not be granted in any case between an employer and employees, etc., growing out of a dispute concerning the terms and conditions of employment, unless necessary to prevent irreparable injury to property, or to a property right, of the party making the application, for which injury there is no adequate remedy at law, and that such property right must be described with particularity in the application, which must be in writing and sworn to by the applicant or by his agent or attorney,-is merely declaratory of the law as it stood before. P. 469.

9. The second paragraph of § 20 of the Clayton Act, which provides that "no such injunction shall prohibit" certain specified acts, manifestly refers to injunctions in any case of the character mentioned in the paragraph preceding, namely, "a case between an employer and employees. . involving, or growing out of, a dispute concerning terms or conditions of employment;" and the concluding words of the second paragraph, "nor shall any of the acts specified in this paragraph be considered or held to be violations of any law of the United States," are to be read in the light of the context, and mean only that those acts are not to be so held when committed by parties concerned in a "dispute concerning terms or conditions of employment." P. 469.

10. As the section imposes an exceptional and extraordinary restriction upon the equity powers of the federal courts, and upon the general operation of the anti-trust laws, conferring a special privilege or immunity upon a particular class to the detriment of the general public, the rules of statutory construction forbid that the privilege be enlarged by resorting to a loose construction or by ignoring or slighting the qualifying words of the section. P. 471. 11. This section confines the exceptional privilege to those who are proximately and substantially concerned in an actual dispute respecting the terms or conditions of their own employment, past, present or prospective; it does not use the words "employers and employees" in a general class sense, or treat all the members of a labor organization as parties to a dispute which proximately affects but a few of them. Pp. 471 et seq.

Argument for Appellant.

254 U.S.

12. That the Clayton Act was not intended to legalize the secondary boycott is shown by its legislative history. P. 474.

13. In construing an act of Congress, debates expressing views and motives of individual members may not be resorted to, but reports of committees and explanatory statements in the nature of a supplemental report made by the committee member in charge of the bill in course of passage, may. Id.

252 Fed. Rep. 722, reversed.

THE case is stated in the opinion.

Mr. Walter Gordon Merritt and Mr. Daniel Davenport for appellant:

This is not an ordinary labor case in which the defendants have sought to improve their conditions of employment by a strike and incidental picketing against their employer, to which the ordinary rules relative to labor unions are applicable. Such a case involves manufacturing and production, which are the peculiar concern of labor unions.

The attack here is upon complainant's trade and commerce, United States v. Knight Co., 156 U. S. 1; Dr. Miles Medical Co. v. Park & Sons Co., 220 U. S. 373; and there is not, nor has there been, any strike or discontent among the complainant's employees, except the ordered quitting work on August 27, 1913, of eleven out of 200 in the factory at Battle Creek and three road men erecting presses in different parts of the country. The complainant's productive organization is intact, and there is a harmonious copartnership between it and its employees, producing goods which are being attacked by union men in the interest of union factories and their employees. If complainant's employees were dissatisfied and had withdrawn from their employment with the complainant, and there was nothing else in the case, it would be a strike case, but since outsiders are trying to attack the trade and commerce being carried on through a harmoni

443.

Argument for Appellant.

ous partnership of labor and capital it is a boycott case. When employer and employees are working happily together to such an extent that the workmen refuse all inducements to strike, any further interference with their rights, whether it be by violence, intimidation or a boycott of the fruits of their toil, is illegal. If strikers or labor union representatives cannot persuade men to quit work, their rights are exhausted and they cannot resort to additional and more drastic methods. A strike is a fight between labor and capital, where labor withdraws from its copartnership with capital, and such a withdrawal because of dissatisfaction with the terms of the partnership is lawful. But a boycott necessarily implies that the goods are being produced by an existing organization of labor and capital, so that any attack on the goods and the sale of those goods is an attack upon both labor and capital, by union men working in the interest of union employers—and sometimes at their instigation-to prevent the sale of the open-shop products and secure a monopoly for the union-made products; it is the openshop employer and his employees on the one side and the union employer and union employees on the other side, and the legality of the combination is not to be tested by the rules applicable to a labor-capital fight where labor merely withdraws from its partnership with capital, but is to be tested by the anti-trust laws which define the lawful methods of competition in the sale and distribution of products.

One of the purposes of the anti-trust laws is to give the public the benefit of free competition, so that all products surviving the battle of fair competition may flow naturally into the public markets of the nation for the selection of consumers. Any artificial or unreasonable obstruction to trade which deprives the public of these advantages necessarily violates the anti-trust laws.

To unduly restrict competition or obstruct the course

Argument for Appellant.

254 U. S.

of trade is injurious to the public because it deprives the public of its inherent right of enjoying the service and the fruits of the service of everybody, and because if the obstruction is successful it keeps goods from the market and restricts the public's right of choice in determining what articles it may purchase. Any combination which, by artificial means, seeks to obstruct the course of trade, is illegal, and only that obstruction is tolerated which is incidental to the ordinary and regular pursuit of a business. The combination in the case at bar and the injury which it has inflicted and threatens to inflict upon the complainant was not incidental to the pursuit of any legitimate business, but had for its sole and direct purpose the suppression of the complainant's competition by erecting an artificial barrier between complainant and its customers and destroying its interstate trade.

The object of the defendants is to prevent the sale and use of machines unless they come from factories operated and exclusively manned by members of the combination and in accordance with methods approved by it. According to the defendants' contentions, and the contentions of the union factories which have conceded their demands, they must protect the union factories from the competition of the open-shop factories, because, under the natural laws of trade and competition, the union factories cannot survive with their increased cost of production. Not being able to control the complainant's producing organization at Battle Creek because the employees are contented with their employment, the only possible method by which this could be accomplished is to restrain the trade and commerce of the complainant by making their products unsalable. This is done by calling strikes against their installation, preventing common carriers from hauling them, threatening purchasers with strikes of pressmen, and with the impossibility of operating the presses, causing breakdowns of such presses, preventing