The problems of national communication, Western settlement, and public lands resulted from the completion of the continental railways, while the railways themselves gave a new significance to transportation in America. During the years of the Granger movement the doctrine had been established that railroads are quasi-public and are subject to regulation by public authority. In the Granger Cases in 1877 the Supreme Court recognized the right of the States to establish rates by law, even when these rates, by becoming part of a through rate, had an incidental effect upon interstate commerce. The problem had been viewed as local or regional during the seventies. Most of the States had passed railway laws and had proceeded to accumulate a volume of statistical information upon the railway business, that was increased by such public investigations as the Windom and Hepburn Reports and by lawsuits that revealed the nature of special favors and rebates. Before the States had gone far in the direction of railway regulation it was discovered that no State could regulate an interstate railway with precision and justice. The great systems built up by Villard and Gould and Vanderbilt and Huntington dominated whole regions and precipitated the question of the effectiveness of state action. The continental lines, necessarily long and traversing several States, emphasized the inequality between the powers of a State and the problem to be met. Their national character pointed to national control. In Congress there were repeated attempts after 1873 to secure the passage of an Interstate Commerce Act. In continuation of this campaign a committee headed by Senator Shelby M. Cullom, of Illinois, made a new investigation in 1885, and reported early in 1886 that supervision and publicity were required, and that these could best be obtained through a federal commission with large powers of taking testimony and examining books. The committee was convinced, as the public was already convinced, that the problem had become national. The Supreme Court reached the same opinion in 1886 when it handed down a new decision in the case of the Wabash Railway Company vs. Illinois. Here it reversed or modified its own decision in the Granger Cases. In 1877 it had ruled that railways are subject to regulation and that the States under their police powers may regulate. It now adhered to its major premise, but declared that such regulation as affected an interstate rate is exclusively a federal function. In effect it determined that if there was to be regulation of the great systems it could only be at the hands of Congress.