1. Results of the Tobacco Dissolution plan as claimed by the Peti- 2. Claim of the American Tobacco Company with respect to the Division of the Tobacco Business of the United States by Volume 4. Distribution of Purchases of Different Types of Tobacco with Esti- mate of Average Aggregate as claimed by the American Tobacco 6. Objections of the National Cigar Leaf Tobacco Association, etc., to the plan of Disintegration, filed by the American Tobacco 8. Claim of the Independents in Regard to the Distribution of To- IMPORTANT THE editor desires to call attention to the following points: 1. The editor is alone responsible for the typographical work in the volume. So far as possible it was attempted to reproduce the documents exactly as they were in the original. The editor believes that all the errors in spelling and construction have been duly noted. To have done the same with the very numerous errors in punctuation, use of parentheses, etc. etc., would have unnecessarily cumbered the pages. Such errors as are discovered therefore in this respect will probably be found to be errors in the originals. 2. Some of the court decisions were necessarily taken from advance copies as at the time the volume was made up they had not been published in the reports. 3. The paging in the Stanley and Interstate Commerce Committee Investigations differs somewhat in the first copies issued and the last. 4. The title of the Interstate Commerce Investigation reads in original, sometimes "Hearing" and at others "Hearings." 5. Lines and fictitious initials have been used instead of names in many places in Chapter XII. 6. Examination of the document beginning on page 118 will show that it resembles both a pooling agreement and a factor's agreement. As a single contract the party of the first part is constituted a factor of the Table and Stair Oil Cloth Association. Several of such contracts, however, were the basis of the pool. The document should be read both as a pooling and as a factor's agreement. INDUSTRIAL COMBINATIONS AND TRUSTS CHAPTER I SPECIMENS OF EARLY POOLING NOTE THE industrial combination and trust movement as a feature of our national life may be said to date from the pools in the cordage industry about 1860. These combinations were shortly succeeded in the middle of the sixties by the organization of the Michigan Salt Association, and the first anthracite coal combination appears to have been formed in 1871. The pools of the anthracite coal roads continued a more or less intermittent and spasmodic existence down to the passage of the Interstate Commerce Act of 1887. Both the seventies and eighties were characterized by numerous combinations of the same type. Among these may be mentioned the Western Export Association, the United Refining Company, Gunpowder Manufacturers' Association, Kentucky Distilleries' Association, Wall Paper Association, Sand Paper Association, Upholsterers' Felt Association, Standard Envelope Company and others. Space permits the reproduction of only three documents showing the form of organization and methods of these early combinations. So brief an examination may be justified first, by the fact that these pools are now chiefly of historic interest, and second that their organization and methods of operation have in nearly every case been substantially reproduced in more recent combinations whose agreements will be shown in other chapters. The first exhibit in the following pages is the pooling agreement of the Gunpowder Manufacturers, which was adopted April 23, 1872. In essence it is a simple agreement for the maintenance of prices. In the second agreement, that of the Kentucky Distillers, we have an example of a pool formed primarily to divide output |