The sources of agrarian discontent were obvious. During the War, prices had been high and thousands of farm "hands" and mechanics had become land owners, thanks to the homestead laws enacted by the Republican party; but they had little capital to start with, and their property was heavily mortgaged. When the inflated War prices collapsed, they found themselves compelled to pay interest at the old rate, and they figured it out that capitalists and bondholders were the chief beneficiaries of the Federal financial legislation. In spite of all that had been paid on the national and private debts, the amount still due, they reckoned, measured in the products of toil, wheat and corn, was greater than ever. They, therefore, hit on the conclusion that the chief source of trouble was in the contraction of the currency which reduced the money value of their products. The remedy obviously was inflation in some form.[35] While the currency thus became the chief agrarian issue, the farmers attributed a part of their troubles to the railway companies whose heavily "watered" capital made high freight rates necessary, and whose discriminations in charges fell as heavy burdens on shippers outside of the zones of competition. The agrarians, therefore, resorted to railway legislation in their respective states--the regulation of rates and charges for transportation and the conditions under which grain should be warehoused and handled. In Illinois, Iowa, Wisconsin, and other states, the law makers yielded to the pressure of the farmers for this kind of legislative relief, and based their legal contentions on the ground that the railways "partook of the nature of public highways." The Grangers were strengthened in their convictions by the violence of the opposition offered on the part of the railways to the establishment of rates and charges by public authority, and by their constant appeals to the courts for relief.[36]