Above The Law

The Iron Age of July 25, page 29, contains details of "The Steel Billet Pool." This trust is a revival of the association which has, at intervals, been doing business for many years. The members of this new pool are the United States Steel Corporation, Jones & Laughlin Steel Company, Wheeling Steel and Iron Company, Cambria Steel Company, Pennsylvania Steel Company, Lackawanna Steel Company and Maryland Steel Company. Meetings are held at New York every day, at which inquiries and sales are regularly reported. The agreement refers exclusively to prices, which have been established for the principal points of consumption, and which are quoted in the Iron Age. This trust, like its prototypes, the Steel-rail Pool, the Sheetsteel Association, and dozens of others, with which the United States Steel Corporation is mixed up, are trusts in every sense of the word, not only under the Sherman anti-trust law, but in the eyes of the common law. All the Department has to do is to obtain, in legal manner, the facts as published in regard to all these trusts and the Attorney-General will have no trouble in squelching them. Why are these great law-breakers not now at the bar of justice? Are the trusts above the laws?