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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
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