The American term anti-trust arose not because the U.S. statutes had anything to do with ordinary trust law, but because the large American corporations used trusts to conceal the nature of their business arrangements. Big trusts became synonymous with big monopolies, the perceived threat to democracy and the free market these trusts represented led passage of the Sherman and Clayton Acts. These laws, in part, codified past American and English common law of restraints of trade. Senator Hoar, an author of the Sherman Act said in a debate, "We have affirmed the old doctrine of the common law in regard to all inter-state and international commercial transactions and have clothed the United States courts with authority to enforce that doctrine by injunction." Evidence of the common law basis of the Sherman and Clayton Acts is found in "Standard Oil of New Jersey v. United States", where Chief Justice White explicitly linked the Sherman Act with the common law and sixteenth-century English statutes on engrossing. The Act's wording also reflects common law. The first two sections read as follows,