The tendency of manufacturers to centralize was accompanied, as has been pointed out above, by a similar centralization in railways. At the close of the nineteenth century, the Vanderbilt system operated "some 20,000 miles reaching from New York City to Casper, Wyoming, and covering the lake states and the area of the upper Mississippi; the Pennsylvania system with 14,000 miles covers a portion of the same territory, centering particularly in Ohio and Indiana; the Morgan system, operating 12,000 miles, covers the Atlantic seaboard and the interior of the Southern States from New York to New Orleans; the Morgan-Hill system operates 20,000 miles from Chicago and St. Louis to the state of Washington; the Harriman system with 19,000 miles runs from Chicago southward to the Gulf and westward to San Francisco, including a Southern route from New Orleans to Los Angeles; the Gould system with 14,000 miles operates chiefly in the center of the middle west extending southward to the Gulf; in addition to these great systems are a group of minor combinations such as the Atchinson with 7,500 or the Boston and Maine with 3,300 miles of road." Corresponding to this centralization in industries and railways there was, as we have pointed out, a centralization in the control of capital, particularly in two large groups, the Standard Oil and the Morgan interests. As an expert financier, Mr. Moody wrote in 1904: "Viewed as a whole, we find the dominating influences in the trusts to be made up of an intricate network of large and small groups of capitalists, many allied to one another by ties of more or less importance, but all being appendages to, or parties of the greater groups which are themselves dependent on and allied with the two mammoth or Rockefeller and Morgan groups." * * * * * Facing this centralized national economy was a Federal system made for wholly different conditions--a national system of manufacturing, transportation, capital, and organized labor, with a national government empowered, expressly, at least, to regulate only one of those interests, transportation--the other fundamental national interests being referred to the mercy of forty-six separate and independent state legislatures. But it is to be noted, these several legislatures were by no means free to work out their own program of legislation; all of them were, at every point, subjected to Federal judicial control under the general phrases of the Fourteenth Amendment relative to due process of law and the equal protection of the laws.[77] To state it in another way, the national government was powerless to act freely with regard to nearly all of the great national interests, but it was all powerful through its judiciary in striking down state legislation.