The Sherman Act has stopped, not only railroad combinations, but similar agreements existing among manufacturers for the regulation of prices. The case of the Addyston Pipe & Steel Company is the most celebrated of this kind. In 1894 a large number of manufacturers of sewer and gas pipe, the Addyston Company being one, formed a combination to monopolize business and fix prices in thirty-six States and Territories. All companies which were parties to the agreement reserved the right to compete with each other outside of these thirty-six States as fiercely as before. They significantly called the section in which there was to be no competition "pay territory"; and the States outside of this section were known as "free territory." These manufacturers dealt chiefly with municipalities, which usually let contracts for sewer and gas pipe by public bidding. Whenever such a contract was offered, the Addyston combination would meet secretly, decide upon the price they would charge, and then arrange a program of fictitious bids. They then divided the profits among themselves. In this way they forced practically all purchasers in the sections in which they traded to pay exorbitant prices. Indeed, the subsequent history of this combination beautifully illustrates the practical effect upon the public of agreements of this kind. The Addyston and its associate members sold certain pipe in "pay territory," where the combination was enforced, at twenty-four dollars a ton; in "free territory," where they competed with each other, they frequently sold identically the same product at fourteen dollars. The Supreme Court decided that this agreement violated the Sherman Act--that it was a combination or a conspiracy in restraint of trade. William H. Taft, then United States Circuit Judge, wrote an opinion discussing the merits of this dispute which has since become a legal classic. Mr. Taft spent six months in studying the questions involved. Nearly all such cases, however, involved merely what may be called trade agreements. In each case there were actual attempts to fix prices by compact, and these agreements were the only things in common among the different corporations that became parties to them. The several corporations preserved their independent existence; they were not trusts in the sense in which the Standard Oil Company, the American Sugar Refining Company, the United States Steel Company, are trusts--that is, single corporations, producing and distributing the greater part of some particular product. Until President Roosevelt's administration, these trusts had, for the larger part, escaped prosecution under the Sherman Law, the few attempts that had been made to assail them; having ingloriously failed.