er to fix a rate or to compel in
the railroads the uniformity of bookkeeping without which no scientific
rates could be established. After Roosevelt had directed his speeches of
1903 and 1904 to the subject, Congress responded to the public interest
thus aroused with a flood of projected railroad bills. One of these
passed the House of Representatives in 1905, but was held up in the
Senate while a new investigation of interstate commerce, the most
exhaustive since the Cullom investigation of 1885, was undertaken. In
1906 the Hepburn Railway Bill was passed. In its chief provisions it
gave the Interstate Commerce Commission power to fix rates and to
prescribe uniform bookkeeping, and it forbade railways to issue free
passes or to own the freight they carried. The long railroad debate was
made notable by the speeches of a new Senator, Robert M. LaFollette, of
Wisconsin, who had fought his way to the governorship on this issue and
gone through a prolonged fight with the railroads of his own State. He
insisted that public rate-making could not succeed without a preliminary
physical valuation of the roads that would show the extent of their real
capitalization. He talked, often, to empty chairs in the Senate, but he
prophesied that the people had a new interest in their affairs, and that
many of the seats, vacant because of the indifference of their owners,
would soon be filled with Senators of a new type. In vacations he spoke
to public audiences on the same subject, reading his "roll-call," and
telling the people how their representatives voted for or against
commercial privilege. With its enlarged powers the Interstate Commerce
Commission made rapid headway against rebates and discrimination.

The popular revival was well advanced by 1905, but was becoming more
sensational every month. Led on by an expectant public, the magazines
manufactured exposures to supply the market, and hysteria often took the
place of investigation. The real needs of reform were in danger of
being lost in a flood of denunciation. In the spring of 1906 President
Roosevelt spoke out to check the indiscriminate abuse. He drew his topic
from Bunyan's "Man with the Muck-Rake," pointed out that blame and
exposure had run its course, and demanded that enforcement of the law be
taken up, and that efforts be turned from destruction to construction.
He had done much himself to "arouse the slumbering conscience of the
nation," and turned now to direct it tow