Rensselaer Semi-Weekly Republican, Volume 21, Number 10, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 27 October 1899 — HARD BLOW ON TRUSTS. [ARTICLE]

HARD BLOW ON TRUSTS.

Supreme Court Decision in American Glucose Litigation. Trusts and combinations formed for the purpose of controlling prices, regulating outputs of commodities and stifling competition received a body blow at the hands of the Illinois Supreme Court in Springfield Thursday. In ah opinion written by Justice Magruder and concurred in unanimously it is held that the $40,000,000 Glucose Sugar Refining Company, commonly known as the glucose trust, is in fact a trust within the meaning of the statute passed in June, 1893, defining trusts and prohibiting them. In arriving at this conclusion the court follows the reasoning it laid down in the celebrated case which proved the ruin of the whisky trust, and plain terms are used in denouncing the purposes had in view by the organizers of. the company. The case was one begun by George F. Harding of Chicago and makes the American Glucose Company the principal defendant. The American Glucose Company is one of the six concerns which the trust absorbed, and the purpose of the litigation is to prevent the sale of the American Glucose Company to the trust The Supreme Court heard the case upon a writ of error taken by Harding after his amended bill had been dismissed upon a demurrer. The court reverses the decision of the court below and remands the case, with directions which will apparently partly, at least, disrupt the trust. The decree sets aside all the conveyances by which the trust became the owner of the property of the American Glucose Company and all assignments and instruments which accompanied the delivery. The lower court is also directed to furnish every relief consistent with the prayer of the bill.