transportation to
private agencies. The demand for relief was first voiced in state
legislation. The states being powerless to regulate interstate trade,
the national government found it necessary to act, and, in 1887, the
Interstate Commerce Law was passed, having for its chief purpose the
prevention of unjust discrimination. As a regulative measure the law
proved inadequate, its most important provisions being emasculated by
court decisions, and the century ended with effective railway
regulation unaccomplished.

No less pressing than the problem of regulating railroads, over which
the internal commerce of the nation was carried on, was the question of
regulating the great industrial combinations through which a large part
of the buying and selling of the products of the country was
controlled. The unfair advantages secured by large combinations because
of their abundance of capital and the discriminating favors of
railroads enabled them often to throttle competition and to establish
monopolies that were a menace to the public. This situation likewise
called forth federal legislative measures intended to prevent the
monopolization of trade. Previous to 1900, however, but little
application of the law was made.

To the tariff and to the currency the nation owed its most bitter
political struggles after the reconstruction of the Union was
accomplished. The net result of a half dozen efforts to modify the
tariff was the existence, at the end of a century, of a tariff law in
which the general average of duties was 10 per cent higher than the
average at the close of the Civil War. The currency system of the
nation, with the exception of the improvement in banking, became worse
instead of better after the war, the chief trouble arising because of
the adoption of measures intended to satisfy insistent demands for a
greater volume of money, without making provision for its retirement
when business conditions were such as to warrant a contraction of
circulation. A quarter of a century of struggle finally ended in the
overthrow of the advocates of the unlimited issue of cheap money, but
no attempt was made before 1900 to remedy the inelasticity of the
national currency or to check the tendency toward a concentration of
the control of credit in a few financial centers. In 1873 and in 1893
the country suffered from money panics, the latter one being due almost
entirely to unwise financial measures that had virtually bankrupted