ing the rates outside
the State. When the courts decided the cases against the railroads,
as in most cases they did, these corporations set about to secure the
repeal of the laws. They started campaigns of education, frequently
through magazine or newspaper articles pointing out the injustice of the
Granger laws and insisting that they were working great public damage.
It is a fact that a decrease in railroad construction followed the
Granger demonstration, and the friends of the railroads insisted that
timid capital hesitated to embark in an enterprise that was constantly
subject to legislative attack. These campaigns succeeded much better
than the more violent opposition to which the railroads had first
resorted. The Western States in the majority of cases repealed their
most drastic legislation. Nearly all the laws fixing maximum rates
disappeared from the books, and even Iowa and Wisconsin substituted
for these measures supervisory and advisory commissions after the
Massachusetts model.

While the Granger movement thus failed effectively to curb the
railroads, it succeeded in arousing great popular interest in the
railroad problem and in placing before the public several of the most
important details of that problem. Not the least of its achievements
were the decisions which it obtained from the Supreme Court of the
United States. The Granger cases are among the most epoch-making in
American history, and they fixed for all time the principles of American
policy in dealing with the railroad question. They are particularly
worthy of study by those who have regarded the Supreme Court as the
bulwark of social injustice and as a body which can always be relied
upon to protect the rights of property against the interests of the
masses. In its railroad decisions this change hardly holds; for these
Granger cases sustain practically all the legal contentions made by the
Granger legislatures. * The cases fixed for all time the point that
a State, acting under the police power, may regulate the charges of a
railroad even to the extent of fixing maximum rates. They even went
so far as to hold that the right to fix rates is not subject to any
restraint by the court on the ground of unreasonableness, a principle
which the Supreme Court has reversed in more recent times. The courts
also held that a State, at least until Congress acted, could regulate
interstate commerce, but this decision also has since then been
reversed. These