_ Illinois attained to a point at which they
began to grasp many important prerogatives of sovereignty, and to
impose, what was tantamount to, arbitrary taxation upon a large scale.
The crucial trial of strength came on the contest for control of the
railways, and in that contest concentrated capital prevailed. The
Supreme Court reversed its attitude, and undertook to do that which it
had solemnly protested it could not do. It began to censor legislation
in the interest of the strongest force for the time being, that force
being actually financial. By the year 1800 the railway interest had
expanded prodigiously. Between 1876 and 1890 the investment in railways
had far more than doubled, and, during the last five years of this
period, the increment had been at an average of about $450,000,000
annually. At this point the majority of the court yielded, as ordinary
political chambers always must yield, to extraordinary pressure. Mr.
Justice Bradley, however, was not an ordinary man. He was, on the
contrary, one of the ablest and strongest lawyers who sat on the federal
bench during the last half of the nineteenth century; and Bradley, like
Story before him, remonstrated against turning the bench of magistrates,
to which he belonged, from a tribunal which should propound general
rules applicable to all material facts, into a jury to find verdicts on
the reasonableness of the votes of representative assemblies.
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