tal causes."[373]

REGULATION OF RAILROAD RATES: THE INTERSTATE COMMERCE COMMISSION

On account of the large element of "fixed charges" which enters into the
setting of rates by railway companies, competition between lines for new
business was from the first very sharp, and resulted in many evils
which, in the early 70's, led in the Middle West to the enactment by the
State legislatures of the so-called "Granger Laws"; and in the famous
"Granger Cases," headed by Munn _v._ Illinois,[374] the Court at first
sustained this legislation, in relation to both the commerce clause and
the due process of law clause of Amendment XIV. The principal
circumstance, however, which shaped the Court's attitude toward the
"Granger Laws" had, by a decade later, disappeared, the fact, namely,
that originally the railroad business was largely in local hands. In
consequence, first, of the panic of 1873, and then of the panic of 1885,
hundreds of these small lines went into bankruptcy, from which they
emerged consolidated into great interstate systems. The result for the
Court's interpretation of the commerce clause was determinative. In the
case of Wabash, St. Louis and Pacific R. Co. _v._ Illinois,[375] decided
in 1886, it was ruled that a State may not regulate charges for the
carriage even within its own boundaries of goods brought from without
the State or destined to points outside it; that in this respect
Congress's power over interstate commerce was exclusive. The following
year, Congress, responding to a widespread public demand, passed the
original Interstate Commerce Act.[376]

By this measure a commission of five was created with authority to pass
upon the "reasonableness" of all charges by railroads for the
transportation of goods or persons in interstate commerce and to order
the discontinuance of all such charges as it found to be "unreasonable,"
or otherwise violative of the provisions of the act. In Interstate
Commerce Commission _v._ Brimson,[377] decided in 1894, the validity of
the Commission as a means "necessary and proper" for the enforcement of
Congress's power to regulate commerce among the States was sustained, as
well as its right to enter the courts of the United States in order to
secure process for the execution of its orders. Later decisions of the
Court, however, including one in which the act was construed not to give
the Commission power to set reasonable maximum rates in substitution for
those found by i