to the course of justice. The bill as proposed vested in the Interstate Commerce Commission the power to fix rates. Critics of this declared that such action might easily become confiscatory, and that rates might be fixed so low as to require the roads to do business at a loss. This, said Knox, who had withdrawn from the Cabinet to become Senator from Pennsylvania, would involve a violation of the "due process" clause of the Constitution. The most successful of the anti-trust jurists, he now led the demand for insertion in the bill of a recognized right of judicial review whereby the railroads should be entitled to bring the fairness of an established rate before the courts. The Senate accepted his doctrine. Three times the measure went to conference before the two houses could agree, and the bill could become a law on June 29, 1906.

The Hepburn Act widely extended Government control over railroads. Among its most significant clauses from the standpoint of regulation was one that empowered the Interstate Commerce Commission to establish uniform systems of accounting, and to prescribe what books the roads should keep, and how they should keep them. A lack of genuine comparative knowledge on railroad problems impeded railroad control from the start, since no two roads kept identical accounts, and none permitted public scrutiny. The organization of the new accounting systems was worked out in the next few years under the direction of Professor Henry Carter Adams, who had long been associated with the Commission as statistician. Adams was himself a protégé of Thomas Mortimer Cooley, of Michigan, who had done much to define the functions of the Interstate Commerce Commission in its early years.

free passes

As it became clear that legislation for control must be expected, railroad practice was generally modified in the Abolition of direction of improvement of manners and the elimination of abuses. The old practice of the railroads' law offices to fight everything was displaced by a new desire to compromise and avoid trouble. The Hepburn Act forbade the issuance of private passes, and con

free passes.

tributed directly to the cessation of an old abuse. The railroads had ever been the victims of petty graft by public men who demanded free transportation for themselves. National conventions expected to be brought together on Editors regarded them as among the perquisites of their business, and even among the reform and anti-monopoly extremists it is possible to point to individuals who expected the railroads to transport them without charge. The muckrakers believed that the pass system was a form of petty bribery. In any event it was a fraud upon the stockholders that now rapidly disappeared.

With the passage of the railroad law the United States entered upon a decade of legislation for the extension of its powers of control. A second law passed in Pure Food June, 1906, projected federal power in a new and Act, 1906 unexpected direction, for the protection of the public health. With the change in habits of life brought about by the revolution in communication and manufacture in the eighties, population drifted from the farms to the cities, and the manufacture of food went far along its course from the domestic basis to the factory basis. In the meat industries the development of the packing companies went hand in hand with the rise of the cow country. The refusal of Europe to permit the importation of American meats on the ground that they were unfit for food gave the incentive to create, in 1884, the Bureau of Animal Husbandry to inaugurate a policy of federal meat inspection. The creation of the Department of Agriculture in 1889 and the broadening of meat inspection in 1891 are steps in the progressive extension of public control over the food of the country. The industrial changes, to which the packers contributed, continued without stop. Factory food displaced home-cooked food, and the grocer came to carry a steadily increasing portion of his stock in proprietary packages instead of bulk. The cereal foods came into line before the Spanish War. Clever inventions brought into the market shredded wheat, grapenuts, and corn flakes, while campaigns of national advertising, brightened with doggerel and cartoon, produced a market for the package foods.

The growth of the food industries was attended by risks foreseen from an early period. The factory provided no substitute for the vigilance of the good housewife in protecting the quality of food, the standards of preparation, or in controlling the use of adulterants. A mild interest in legislation within this field can be traced for many years. The muckrakers' exploitation of the packing-houses brought it within the realm of practical politics in 1906, and legislation to protect the purity of food and drugs was placed upon the statutes within the control of the Department of Agriculture. The scientific determination of the value of foods and the influence of adulterants and preservatives was still to be worked out and manufacturers were still to be convinced that the public would consume as readily a jam containing artificial coloring and synthetic flavor as the same jam dishonestly labeled as a pure fruit product. The detailed and technical work involved in a successful assertion of a policy of food control brought into every household a fuller recognition of the new functions of Government.

Admission of Oklahoma

In 1907 Congress paused in its task of constructive legislation long enough to terminate an old problem by the admission of a new State. Nearly a century before, Congress had entered upon a policy of Indian consolidation upon the western frontier. The Indian Country was legalized in 1830, placed under the control of an Indian Commissioner in 1832, and safeguarded by the Indian Intercourse Act of 1834. No sooner had the Indian Country been clearly established than the process of reducing its area by the creation of new States was begun. After 1854 it was reduced to a tract nearly surrounded by the States of Kansas, Arkansas, and Texas, and thereafter it was generally though incorrectly known as the "Indian Territory."

The fertile lands between the Red River and the Arkansas, dedicated to the Indians in the thirties, aroused the cupidity of white settlers half a century later. President after President proclaimed against the illegal invasion of the area. After the Civil War, as a penalty for sympathizing with the

Confederacy, the Indians forfeited a portion of their lands. In the later eighties they sold still more in the process whereby their own holdings were reduced to a basis of severalty. In the early nineties the lands of Oklahoma were opened and the white invasion brought into existence a new territory, that before 1900 had aspirations to become a state. A long dispute over the basis of statehood was waged in the next five years. Should there be one State or two, Indian Territory and Oklahoma, or an amalgamation? In June, 1906, Congress finally passed an enabling act for a single State, and in the winter of 1906-07 the people of Oklahoma gathered in their constitutional convention.

There is no shorter route to an understanding of the constitutional ideals of any period in American history than through the study of the debates whereby a new State constitution is created. Every new State has drawn its first citizens chiefly from the young and enthusiastic classes of its neighboring States. These have invariably begun their work with the fundamental acceptance of the underlying bases of American government, and have built upon these a structure embodying the ideals of the moment. The Oklahoma constitution was long, specific, and radical. It recognized the duty of the State to extend a protecting control over its citizens. It was approved by Bryan with his Populistic background, and was criticized by Taft, now Secretary of War, from the standpoint of the conservative judge. It contained as its novelty in government a scheme for the public guarantee of bank deposits, and became the forty-sixth State in the Union by proclamation of the President November 16, 1907.

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE

Balthazar H. Meyer, The Northern Securities Case (1906), is a careful study of the concentration of railroads. Albert H. Walker, History of the Sherman Law (1913), and Oswald W. Knauth, Policy of the United States towards Industrial Monopoly (1914), give full accounts of the workings of the anti-trust laws. Charles R. Van Hise, Concentration and Control (1912), presents a solution of the trust problem. Roy Gittinger, History of the Formation of the State of Oklahoma (1917), is an adequate narrative.

CHAPTER XXXIV

NATIONAL RESOURCES

THE period of prosperity ushered in by President McKinley outlasted the terms of his Republican successors, Roosevelt and Taft. Not until 1913 was there any

Period of prosperity

general depression in the United States that threatened to bring business to a standstill. From time to time there were flurries in the stock market that were more truly ascribable to over-speculation than to adversity. The brief crisis of May, 1901, was occasioned by stock gambling incidental to a struggle for the control of the Northern Pacific Railway. In October, 1907, there came a somewhat larger panic that was ascribed by its sufferers to the meddling of Roosevelt with business, and was called the "Roosevelt panic."

Panic of 1907

The open trouble began with the suspension of the Knickerbocker Trust Company in New York on October 22. During the next few days there was uncertainty as to the extent to which the collapse might go. A string of Eastern speculative ventures, in whose management there had been an element of fraud, broke down, but the clearing-houses of the great cities managed to limit the range of suffering. Banks in general restricted their payments to depositors to their minimum cash necessities, and large numbers of checks were made payable only through the clearing-houses. For the time being there was an almost complete suspension of credit, and much hoarding of money by private holders. The critics of the President scolded at "Theodore the meddler" and the New York Sun gave wide circulation to the motto of business: "Let us alone."

Whether Roosevelt was responsible or not, the panic advertised the fact that the Currency Act of 1900 had failed to stabilize the currency. It had provided a policy