In the end an Inter-state Commerce law was passed, in which the presence of a national interest in respect to the American system of transportation was recognized.  But this law, like our tariff laws, was framed for the benefit chiefly of a combination of local and special interests; and it served little to advance any genuine national interest in relation to the railroads.  To be sure it did forbid rebates, but the machinery for enforcing the prohibition was inefficient, and during another twenty years the prohibition remained substantially a dead letter.  The provisions of the law forbidding rebates were in truth merely a bit of legal hypocrisy.  Rebates could not be openly defended; but the business of the country was honeycombed with them, and the majority of the shippers in whose interest the law was passed did not want the prohibition enforced.  Their influence at Washington was sufficiently powerful to prevent the adoption of any effective measures for the abatement of the evil.  The Federal Inter-state Commerce Commission, unlike the local authorities, would have been fully competent to abolish rebates; but the plain truth was that the effective public opinion in the business world either supported the evil or connived at it.  The private interests at stake were, for the time being, too strong for the public interest.  The whole American business tradition was opposed to government interference with prevailing business practices; and in view of this fact the responsibility for the rebates cannot be fixed merely upon the railroads and the trusts.  The American system had licensed energetic and unscrupulous individual aggrandizement as the best means of securing a public benefit; and rebates were merely a flagrant instance of the extent to which public opinion permitted the domination of private interests.

The failure of the Federal government to protect the public interest in a matter over which the state governments had no effective control, has greatly accelerated the organization of American industries on a national scale, but for private and special purposes.  Certain individuals controlling certain corporations were enabled to obtain a decided advantage in supplying certain services and products to the enormously increasing American market; and once those individuals and corporations had obtained dominant positions, it was in their interest to strengthen one another’s hands in every possible way.  One big corporation has as a rule preferred to do business with another big corporation.  They were all of them producing some standard commodity or service, and it is part of the economical conduct of such businesses to buy and sell so far as possible in large quantities and under long contracts.  Such contracts reduced to a comparatively low level the necessary uncertainties of business.  It enabled the managers of these corporations to count upon a certain market for their product or a certain cost for part of their raw material; and it must be remembered