The danger to any individual is so tremendous if he is to be conspired against by thousands, hundreds of thousands, not by one neighbor, but by all the people of the town, that it early got established as a principle of the common law, and of these early English statutes, that, although one man alone might do an act which, otherwise lawful, was to the injury of a third person, and be neither restrained nor punished for it, he could not _combine with others_ for that purpose by the very same acts. For instance, I don't like the butcher with whom I have been doing business; I take away my trade. That, of course, I have a perfect right to do. But going a step farther, I tell my friends I don't like Smith and don't want to trade with him--probably I have a right to do that; but when I get every citizen of that town together at a meeting and say: "Let us all agree to ruin Smith, we will none of us trade with him"--Smith is bound to be ruined. The common law early recognized this importance of the principle of combination, and therefore it was part of the English common law and is still, barring one recent statute, that a combination to injure a person, although by an act which if done by one individual would be lawful, is nevertheless an unlawful combination; that is, a _conspiracy_ under the law; for all "conspiracies" are unlawful, under the law; the meaning of the word _conspiracy_ in the law is, not an innocent combination, but a guilty one, and anything which is a _conspiracy_ at law can be punished criminally, or will give rise to civil suits for damages by the parties injured, or usually entitle one to the protection of an injunction. A conspiracy, therefore, is not only a guilty combination, of two or more persons, for an unlawful end by any means, or for a lawful end by unlawful means, but also one for an immoral end, a malicious end, as, let us say, the ruin of a third person, or the injury of the public. All the dispute about the law of conspiracy and the statutes and what laborers can do and what employers can do to-day really hinges about that last clause. The labor leaders, the radicals, want to say that nothing shall be a conspiracy where the end is not unlawful and where the acts done are such as, if done by an individual, would not be wrong. In other words, they want statutes to provide that nothing is a conspiracy where the acts done are in themselves lawful if done by one individual. But this English conspiracy law was of the most immense sociological value, in that it did recognize the tremendous power of _combination_. It said, although you don't have to trade with Smith alone, yet a combination of a great many individuals for the purpose of ruining Smith, by all simultaneously refusing to trade with him, is such a tremendous injury to Smith that the law will take cognizance of it and hold that kind of a combination to be unlawful.