All this legislation is extremely recent. In the writer's digest of "American Statute Law," published in 1886, I find no mention of trusts in this modern sense, though a special chapter is given to them in volume II, published in 1892. The first legal writing in which the word was used and the rise of the thing itself adverted to is, so far as I know, a contribution to the _Harvard Law Review_, entitled Trusts, vol. I, page 132; but the trust then had in mind was the simple early form of the railway equipment trust said to have been invented in Pennsylvania, which was indeed copied in the first agreement, so long kept secret, of the Standard Oil Trust; and also the corporate stock trust, that is to say, the practice then beginning of persuading stockholders to intrust a majority of the capital stock of the corporation into the hands of trustees, receiving in return therefor trust certificates, with a claim to the net earnings of the corporation, but without real voting power; and there are cases in which such trusts were sought to be held invalid and enjoined in equity, sometimes with and sometimes without success. Before going into the details of anti-trust legislation, it would be well to sketch its history on the broadest possible lines. Legislation began first in the States some years before the Federal Anti-trust Law, or Sherman Act, first enacted in 1890. These earlier statutes, including the Sherman Act itself, made illegal all contracts or combinations between persons or corporations in restraint of trade; and their direct result was to compel the formation of the gigantic modern trust as we now understand it. Had the Sherman Act, instead of being called "An Act to Protect Trade and Commerce Against Unlawful Restraints and Monopolies," been entitled "An Act to Compel the Formation of Large Trusts by all Persons Engaged in Similar Lines of Business," it would have been far more correctly described in its title. For whereas, before this act persons or corporations could make contracts or arrangements among themselves which were good and valid working agreements unless so clearly monopolistic as to be held unreasonable restraint of trade at the common law (which, indeed, so far as I know, was never done in any American court), after the Sherman Act was passed all such contracts, combinations, or arrangements, even when reasonable and proper, were made illegal and criminal. The only escape, therefore, was to bring all such persons and corporations in the same trade together in one corporation, and this is precisely what we now term a trust. Before 1890, in other words, a trust was really an agreement, a combination of individuals or corporations usually resting upon an actual deed of trust under which the constituent parties surrendered their property or the control of their property to a central board of trustees; since 1890 this kind of trust has practically disappeared and been replaced by