Meanwhile the demand for regulation was gaining strength in the Eastern States, but for somewhat different reasons. The farmers of New England, New York, and the Eastern region in general had not particularly sympathized with the Granger legislation; they already had great difficulty in competing with the large Western farms, and a reduction in rates to the seaboard would have made their position even less endurable. This attitude was unquestionably selfish but entirely comprehensible. The agitation for railroad reform in the East came chiefly from the manufacturing and commercial classes. Here the main burden of the complaint was the railroad rebate. This was a method of giving lower rates to large shippers than to small--charging the favored shipper the published rate and then, at stated periods, surreptitiously returning part of the payment. This was perhaps the most vicious abuse of which the railroads have ever been guilty. That the common law forbade the practice and that it likewise violated the implied contract upon which the railroad obtained its franchise was hardly open to dispute; yet up to 1887 no specific law in this country prohibited the practice. For many years the rebate hung over the American business world, a thing whose existence was half admitted, half denied, a kind of ghostly economic terror that seemed persistently to drive the small corporation to bankruptcy and the large corporation to dominating influence. The Standard Oil Company was the "monster" that was believed especially to thrive upon this kind of sustenance, though this was by no means the only industry that maintained such secret relations with the railroads; the Carnegie Steel Corporation, for example, accepted rebates almost as persistently. It was not until 1879, when the Hepburn Committee in New York State had its hearings, that all the facts concerning the rebate were exposed officially to public view. The contracts of the Standard Oil Company with the railroads were placed upon the records and these showed that all the worst suspicions regarding this practice were justified. This disclosure made the railroad rebate one of the most familiar facts in American industrial life; and in consequence a demand arose for Federal legislation that would definitely make the practice a crime and also for some kind of Federal supervision to do effectively the work which the state commissions had failed to do. By this time it was clear enough that the only hope of adequate regulation lay with the Federal Government. Congressman Reagan, of Texas, had for years been pushing a bill to regulate interstate commerce and to prohibit unjust discriminations by common carriers; other measures periodically made their appearance in the Senate; but the Houses had been unable to agree and nothing had been done.