Of course, the fixing of flat rates without any inquiry into the cost of specific services was open to grave objections; but the opposition of the companies was generally based on the contention that they had a right to run their business in their own way. The spirit of this opposition is reflected in an editorial published in the _Nation_, of New York, in January, 1875: "We maintain that the principle of such legislation is either confiscation, or, if another phrase be more agreeable, the change of railroads from pieces of private property, owned and managed for the benefit of those who have invested their money in them, into eleemosynary or charitable corporations, managed for the benefit of a particular class of applicants for outdoor relief--the farmers. If, in the era of progress to which the farmers' movement proposes to introduce us, we are going back to a condition of society in which the only sort of property which we can call our own is that which we can make our own by physical possession, it is certainly important to every one to know it, and the only body which can really tell us is the Supreme Court at Washington." Not content with their achievements in the state legislatures, the agrarians entered national politics in 1876 in the form of the Independent National or Greenback party, designed to "stop the present suicidal and destructive policy of contraction." They declared their belief that "a United States note, issued directly by the government and convertible on demand into United States obligations, bearing a rate of interest not exceeding one cent a day on each one hundred dollars and exchangeable for United States notes at par, will afford the best circulating medium ever devised." In spite of the small vote polled by their standard bearer, Peter Cooper, of New York, they put forward a candidate in the next campaign[37] and made a third attempt in 1884, growing more and more radical in tone. In their last year, they declared: "Never in our history have the banks, the land-grant railroads, and other monopolies been more insolent in their demands for further privileges--still more class legislation. In this emergency the dominant parties are arrayed against the people and are the abject tools of the corporate monopolies." The Greenbackers demanded, in addition to currency reform, the regulation of interstate commerce, a graduated income tax, labor legislation, prohibition of importation of contract laborers, and the reduction of the terms of United States Senators. Although their candidate, B. F. Butler, polled 175,000 votes in 1884, the Greenbackers gave up the contest, and in 1888 yielded their place to the Union Labor party.