any of these laws, and all were modified before many
years. But the railroads' objection lay beneath the detail, and the
fundamental fight turned on two points--the right of public authority to
regulate a rate at all, and whether state regulation was compatible with
the power of Congress over interstate commerce.

By 1876 the appeals of the railroads against the constitutionality of
these Granger Laws had gone through the highest state courts to the
Supreme Court of the United States. In the spring of 1877 that body
handed down a definitive decision in the case of Munn _vs._ the State of
Illinois in which it recognized that the "controlling fact is the power
to regulate at all." It held that when the institutions in question (in
this case warehouses) established themselves, they did so "from the
beginning subject to the power of the body politic to require them to
conform to such regulations as might be established by the proper
authorities for the common good." It upheld the rate laws, declared that
they were not an infringement upon the powers of Congress, and thus gave
formal sanction to a new doctrine in American law.

The legal consequences of the "Granger Cases" extended through the
ensuing generation. The need for public intervention grew steadily
stronger, and as time went on it became clear that this control could
not be administered by orators or spoilsmen, but called for scientific
training and permanence of policy. It was one of many influences working
to reshape American administrative practice.

The Granger movement had close relations with the panic of 1873,
although it must anyway have appeared in the Northwest at no remote
date. As a political force it soon died out, leaving the principle of
regulation as its memorial. With the gradual recurrence of prosperity
the Northwest found new interests, and as early as 1877, when the
decisions were made, the passion had subsided.

It was, however, a gloomy United States that faced the end of its first
century of independence, in 1876. Pessimism was widely spread among the
best educated in the East. Public life was everywhere discredited by the
conduct of high officials. The South was in the midst of its struggle
for home rule, which it could win only through wholesale force and
fraud. The West was discouraged over finance and still depressed by the
panic. Yet Philadelphia went ahead to celebrate the centennial as though
it were ending the century as hopefull