This control of
the Northwestern railway systems was to be effected by organizing a new
"holding" company, and exchanging its stock against the stock of the
various corporations engaged in railway transportation throughout that
vast territory, exactly as the Sugar Trust had acquired control of the
Knight company and other concerns. This company was called the Northern
Securities Company. Not long after I became President, on the advice of
the Attorney-General, Mr. Knox, and through him, I ordered proceedings
to be instituted for the dissolution of the company. As far as could be
told by their utterances at the time, among all the great lawyers in the
United States Mr. Knox was the only one who believed that this action
could be sustained. The defense was based expressly on the ground that
the Supreme Court in the Knight case had explicitly sanctioned the
formation of such a company as the Northern Securities Company. The
representatives of privilege intimated, and sometimes asserted outright,
that in directing the action to be brought I had shown a lack of respect
for the Supreme Court, which had already decided the question at issue
by a vote of eight to one. Mr. Justice White, then on the Court and
now Chief Justice, set forth the position that the two cases were in
principle identical with incontrovertible logic.
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