The amount of business obtained at the fares and rates exacted was disappointingly small. After the grain crop was moved the amount of paying freight was meagre and backloading trifling in amount. Operating expenses rose to eighty per cent. of the gross earnings. The balance of earnings and expenses for the year 1873 was but $1,400,000 for all the Minnesota roads, a sum which must have seemed pitifully small in the eyes of the men whose money had built them. The reader need hardly be told that the Minnesota railroad corporations went down in the crash which came upon the country in 1873. Three defaulted in their interest, two borrowed money to pay it, two went into receivers’ hands, and others attempted assessments on their stockholders. In the next four years but eighty-seven miles of new road were built. When the roads refused to conform to the law of 1871 it became the duty of the attorney-general to bring suit for forfeiture of charters, the prescribed penalty for disobedience. John D. Blake and others sued the Winona and St. Peter Railroad Company in the district court of Olmstead County, alleging that said corporation had exacted for a certain service one dollar and ninety-nine cents, whereas the statute had determined the sum of fifty-seven cents to be the reasonable maximum charge. This court held, with the defending company, that the legislature had no power under the constitution to fix and determine railroad rates. The state intervened and the case was appealed to the Supreme Court of Minnesota, which reversed the decision of the court below, thus sustaining the validity of the act of 1871. The case was then carried to the Supreme Court of the United States and was numbered among the well-known “granger cases,” held under consideration for four years and disposed of according to the principles laid down by that court in the case of Munn _vs._ Illinois. In the “Blake case,” decided in October, 1876, it was held that the legislature of Minnesota was within its constitutional powers in regulating and fixing railroad rates and charges and prescribing penalties for violations of her laws in that behalf.