Mr. Taft approached the trust problem with the pre-conceptions of the lawyer who believes that the indefinite dissolution of combinations is possible under the law. His predecessor had, it is true, instituted many proceedings against trusts, but there was a certain lack of sharpness in his tone, which was doubtless due to the fact that he believed and openly declared that indiscriminate prosecutions under the Sherman law (which was, in his opinion, unsound in many features) were highly undesirable. Mr. Taft, on the other hand, apparently looked at the law and not the economics of the problem. During Harrison's administration there had been four bills in equity and three indictments under the Sherman law; during Cleveland's administration, four bills in equity, two indictments, two informations for contempt; during McKinley's administration, three bills in equity. Mr. Roosevelt had to his record, eighteen bills in equity, twenty-five indictments, and one forfeiture proceeding. Within three years, Mr. Taft had twenty-two bills in equity and forty-five indictments to his credit. The very vigor with which Mr. Taft pressed the cases against the trusts did more, perhaps, to force a consideration of the whole question by the public than did Mr. Roosevelt's extended messages. As has been pointed out, the members of Congress who enacted the Sherman law were very much confused in their notions as to what trusts really were and what combinations and practices were in fact to be considered in restraint of trade.[82] And it must be confessed that the decisions and opinions of the courts, up to the beginning of Mr. Taft's administration, had not done much to clarify the law. In the Trans-Missouri case, decided in 1897, the Supreme Court had declared in effect that all combinations in restraint of trade, whether reasonable or unreasonable, were in fact forbidden by the law, Justice White dissenting.[83]