In theory, the right of the Nation to exercise this power continued unquestioned.

But changing conditions obscured the matter in the sight of the people as a whole; and the conscious and the unconscious advocates of an unlimited and uncontrollable capitalism gradually secured the whittling away of the National power to exercise this theoretical right of control until it practically vanished.

After the Civil War, with the portentous growth of industrial combinations in this country, came a period of reactionary decisions by the courts which, as regards corporations, culminated in what is known as the Knight case.
The Sherman Anti-Trust Law was enacted in 1890 because the formation of the Tobacco Trust and the Sugar Trust, the only two great trusts then in the country (aside from the Standard Oil Trust, which was a gradual growth), had awakened a popular demand for legislation to destroy monopoly and curb industrial combinations.

This demand the Anti-Trust Law was intended to satisfy.

The Administrations of Mr.Harrison and Mr.
Cleveland evidently construed this law as prohibiting such combinations in the future, not as condemning those which had been formed prior to its enactment.