Page:History of Iowa From the Earliest Times to the Beginning of the Twentieth Century Volume 3.djvu/127

 Here the battle was fought out. The railroad committee of the Senate was made up with a majority opposed to repeal. As the fight grew warm two members of that committee were influenced to change their minds and vote for repeal and the Railway Commission bill. This bill had been prepared and drawn by the attorneys of two of the main truck lines of Iowa railroads. It permitted the Governor to appoint the three commissioners who were clothed with the power to give advice and receive their salaries from the railroads; but with no authority to enforce the advice. Excellent and well-known men were appointed and for many years a truce was established between the people and the railroad managers on terms that had been devised by the corporations. All that had been gained by years of agitation, years of untiring effort on the part of the people to establish their sovereignty over corporations through legislation and the courts, was now surrendered by act of the Seventeenth General Assembly. It took ten years to recover the lost ground and cost the people of the State millions of dollars.

Ex-Governor William Larrabee, who has made a special study of railroad business and legislation and is regarded as high authority, in his excellent work on “Railroads” says of the first act for the control of these corporations:

“The Granger Laws have been and still are severely criticised by those opposed to the principle of State control and by the ignorant. It is nevertheless true that those laws were moderate, just and reasonably well adapted to remedy the evils of which the public complained. The obloquy heaped upon them was the work of designing men who desired to continue their impositions upon the people. The Iowa law was imperfect in detail and yet its enactment proved one of the greatest legislative achievements in the history of the State. It demonstrated to the people their ability to correct by earnestness and perseverance the most far-reaching public abuses and led to an emphatic judicial declaration of the common law principle that railroads are highways and, as such, are subject to any legislative control which may be deemed necessary for the public welfare.”

Another important act of this Legislature was that