ates declared the income
tax to be a direct tax, and therefore null and void because it was laid
on incomes wherever found and not apportioned among the states according
to population. The fact that four of the nine judges dissented from this
decision was also an index to the diversity of opinion that divided both
parties.

THE RAILWAYS AND TRUSTS

=The Grangers and State Regulation.=--The same uncertainty about the
railways and trusts pervaded the ranks of the Republicans and Democrats.
As to the railways, the first firm and consistent demand for their
regulation came from the West. There the farmers, in the early
seventies, having got control in state legislatures, particularly in
Iowa, Wisconsin, and Illinois, enacted drastic laws prescribing the
maximum charges which companies could make for carrying freight and
passengers. The application of these measures, however, was limited
because the state could not fix the rates for transporting goods and
passengers beyond its own borders. The power of regulating interstate
commerce, under the Constitution, belonged to Congress.

=The Interstate Commerce Act of 1887.=--Within a few years, the movement
which had been so effective in western legislatures appeared at
Washington in the form of demands for the federal regulation of
interstate rates. In 1887, the pressure became so strong that Congress
created the interstate commerce commission and forbade many abuses on
the part of railways; such as discriminating in charges between one
shipper and another and granting secret rebates to favored persons. This
law was a significant beginning; but it left the main question of
rate-fixing untouched, much to the discontent of farmers and shippers.

=The Sherman Anti-Trust Law of 1890.=--As in the case of the railways,
attacks upon the trusts were first made in state legislatures, where it
became the fashion to provide severe penalties for those who formed
monopolies and "conspired to enhance prices." Republicans and Democrats
united in the promotion of measures of this kind. As in the case of the
railways also, the movement to curb the trusts soon had spokesmen at
Washington. Though Blaine had declared that "trusts were largely a
private affair with which neither the President nor any private citizen
had any particular right to interfere," it was a Republican Congress
that enacted in 1890 the first measure--the Sherman Anti-Trust
Law--directed against great combinations in busin