This act was a timid, halting measure, and the Supreme Court almost immediately sheared away its effectiveness by decisions in favor of the railway companies. The law created a commission of five members empowered to investigate the operations of common carriers and order those who violated the law to desist. The act itself forbade discriminations in rates, pooling traffic, and the charging of more for "short" than "long hauls" over the same line, except under special circumstances. In spite of the good intentions of the commission, the law was practically a dead letter. According to a careful scholar, Professor Davis R. Dewey, "By 1890 the practice of cut rates to favored shippers and cities was all but universal at the West; passes were generally issued; rebates were charged up to maintenance of way account; special privileges of yardage, loading, and cartage were granted; freight was underbilled or carried under a wrong classification and secret notification of intended reduction of rates was made to favored shippers.... The ingenuity of officials in breaking the spirit of the law knew no limit, and is a discouraging commentary on the dishonesty which had penetrated into the heart of business enterprise."[31] The critics of railway policy who were able to force the passage of the interstate commerce act usually coupled the denunciation of the industrial monopolies with their attacks on common carriers; and, three years after the establishment of the interstate commerce commission, Congress, feeling that some kind of action was demanded by the political situation, passed the Sherman anti-trust law of 1890. There was no consensus of opinion among the political leaders as to the significance of the trust. Blaine declared that "trusts were largely a private affair with which neither the President nor any private citizen had any particular right to interfere." Speaker Reed dismissed the subject by announcing that he had heard "more idiotic raving, more pestiferous rant, on that subject than on all others put together." Judge Cooley, on seeing "the utterly heartless manner in which the trusts sometimes have closed many factories and turned men willing to be industrious into the streets in order that they may increase profits already reasonably large," asked whether the trust "as we see it is not a public enemy; whether it is not teaching the laborer dangerous lessons; whether it is not helping to breed anarchy."