194 THE GRANGER MOVEMENT 



rates by the state and marks the end of the Granger railroad 

 legislation of Wisconsin. 1 The new law provided for a single 

 commission with merely supervisory powers in the place of the 

 board established by the Potter law; there were sections pro- 

 hibiting unreasonable charges and discrimination for like services 

 from the same place; and the three principal roads of the state 

 were limited in freight rates to the tariff in force on the St. 

 Paul on June 15, 1872, a maximum which the roads had no desire 

 to exceed. Finally all the sections of the Potter law except 

 such as were merely formal or pertained to the powers of the 

 commission to investigate and report, together with all the other 

 restrictive legislation of 1874 and 1875, including the anti-pass 

 law, were repealed. March 3, Governor Ludington appointed 

 Dana C. Lamb as railroad commissioner. 2 The railroad ques- 

 tion did not trouble the political waters of Wisconsin again for 

 several years. 



SUMMARY OF STATE LEGISLATION 



The four states in which the movement for restrictive railroad 

 legislation during the seventies has been traced are those in 

 which it achieved the most important results and in which it 

 was most closely connected with the movement for agricultural 

 organization. But the demand for the regulation of railroads 

 made its appearance in nearly every state of the Union during 

 the decade, and in a number of other states besides the four 

 already considered there was a more or less direct connection 

 between this movement and the parallel one for agricultural 

 organization, which, as has been seen, was equally widespread. 

 This was particularly true in some of the other states of the 

 upper Mississippi Valley, such as Missouri and Nebraska, and 

 also in California and Oregon on the Pacific slope. 



In Missouri the agitation for state control of railroads presents 

 many similarities to the contemporary movement in the neigh- 

 boring state of Illinois. At the very beginning of the decade 



1 Laws, 1876, ch. xxxvii. See also Appleton's Cyclopedia, 1876, p. 806; Nation, 

 xxiii. 3 (July 6, 1876); Wisconsin Statesman, March n, 1876, p. i. 



2 Senate Journal, 1876, p. 489. 



