< Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 84.djvu
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86
THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY

was grossly exaggerated and misrepresented. The rantings of their more extreme spokesmen were cited as proof that they were wholly without any just ground for complaint. Many thought them bent on confiscation. The hard times following the panic of 1873 were laid at the door of the granger legislation. Nevertheless, the main contentions of the farmers were upheld by the Supreme Court. The granger movement did much toward changing the railway policy of a nation.[1]

Professor Ripley well says:

Great laws are not the figments of men's minds, conjured up in a day. They are a response to the needs of the time. Their true causes are thus immeasurably complex. Nor does a wholesale public demand for legislation arise overnight. From small beginnings the pressure steadily grows, oftentimes for years; until, perhaps through a conjuncture of particularly aggravating events, matters are at last brought suddenly to a head. Yet while this culmination of industrial or social pressure may finally result in legislation under some particularly strong political leadership, to assign such personal influences as even the remote cause of legislation, is to belie all the facts and experience of history. No clearer illustration of the close relationship between economic causes and statutory results could perhaps be found, than in the field of our federal legislation concerning common carriers. It forms one of the most important chapters in our industrial history.[2]

Fair Plat in Other Directions

I

The demand for equality of opportunity at the hands of the railways is part of a much larger movement. The widespread protest against the undue exactions of public utility enterprises in various cities, and the creation of commissions for their control is but another phase of the same thing. Likewise, the movement for the control of the large industrial combination is at bottom a demand for fair play. The revolt against the business methods exemplified by the Standard Oil and the American Tobacco Companies made these concerns so notorious that the Supreme Court ordered their dissolution. In the course of these decisions, price-cutting limited to a portion of the market or to a single line of goods produced by a trust, trade wars which aim at buying up com-

  1. ↑ Solus Justus Buck, "The Granger Movement," Chapters IV., V. and VI.
  2. ↑ William Z. Ripley, op. cit., pp. 441-442. Hadley's "Railroad Transportation" and Johnson's "American Railway Transportation" contain good accounts of the movement for state and federal control of railways in the United States. These two works also contain accounts of the relations of the state to the railways in the principal countries of Europe. Ripley's "Railroads: Rates and Regulation" gives a sympathetic and detailed account of the movement for the control of railway rates by the federal government, but treats only incidentally of the activities of the several states. "Railway Problems," by the same author, contains an excellent selection of reprints. Merritt's "Federal Regulation of Railway Rates" contains a digest of the more important eases that have been decided by the Inter-state Commerce Commission.
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