oney borrowed from the East
threw debtors and creditors into sectional classes injurious to both.

The antagonism to railways was increased because these yet regarded
their trade as private, to be conducted in secrecy, with transportation
to be sold at the best rates that could be got from the individual
customer. The big shipper got the wholesale rate; the small shipper paid
the maximum. Favoritism, discrimination, rebates, were the life of
railway trade, and railway managers objected to them only because they
endangered profits, not because they felt any obligation to maintain
uniformity in charges.

In a community as dependent on the railways as the Northwest was, the
iniquity of discriminatory or extortionate rates was soon seen. The
East, with rival routes and less dependence on staple interests, saw it
less clearly. The charges were paid grumblingly in good times; in bad
times, when the rising greenbacks squeezed the debtor West and the panic
of 1873 stopped business everywhere, the farmers soon made common cause.
They seized upon the skeleton organization of the grange and gave it
life. In 1874 their organized discontent compelled attention.

The Granger Laws were an attempt to establish a new legal doctrine that
railways are quasi-public because of the nature of the service which
they render and the privileges they enjoy. This principle was overlaid
in many cases by the human desire to punish the railroads as the cause
of economic distress, but it was visible in all the laws. It is an old
rule of the common law that the ferryman, the baker, and the innkeeper
are subject to public control, and railways were now classified with
these. In Wisconsin, the "Potter" Law established a schedule with
classified rates, superseding all rate-cards of railroads in that State.
Illinois created a railroad and warehouse commission with power to fix
rates and annul warehouse charters. In Iowa the maximum rates were fixed
by law.

The railroads failed to realize at once what the new laws meant. They
denounced them as confiscatory, and attacked them in court as wrong in
theory and bad in application. Even admitting the principle of
regulation, the laws were so crudely shaped as to be nearly unworkable.
Farmer legislators, chosen on the issue of opposition to railways, were
not likely to show either fairness or scientific knowledge. Coming at
the same time with the panic of 1873, it is impossible to measure the
precise effect of