The abuses of which the people of Iowa complained were far from being confined to their State. They were practiced throughout the Northwest, and the demand for reform was as loud in Minnesota, Wisconsin and Illinois as it was in Iowa. In 1871 laws were passed in Illinois and Minnesota fixing maximum charges for the transportation of freight and passengers and prohibiting discriminations. The railroads claimed that a State did not have the right to prescribe rates and refused to be bound by these laws. Instead of modifying their policy, they became daily more arrogant. Discriminations which had before been practiced under the veil of secrecy, or which had been defended by railroad managers as exceptions to the general rule made necessary by a peculiar combination of circumstances wholly beyond their control, were now openly and defiantly practiced by several of the larger roads. The Chicago, Milwaukee and St. Paul Railroad Company, in its effort to annihilate a rival, went so far as to openly announce to the public its intention to entirely disregard distance as a factor in rate-making. It gradually became the general rule to wage war against rivals at competitive points and to "recoup" by charging excessive rates at non-competitive points. Every encouragement was thus given by the railroads to the Granger movement, which spread in less than two years over the whole Northwest. In the fall of 1873 Iowa elected a Granger legislature, like Minnesota, Wisconsin and Illinois. The wildest predictions were made by railroad men as to the extremes to which the Granger legislature would go, but it confined itself to enacting a law establishing an official classification and fixing maximum rates for all railroad companies. The law was approved March 23, 1874, and went into effect on the 4th of July following. This law in no case compelled companies to carry freight at a lower rate than they had voluntarily carried it in the past. Many of the rates in force at the time of the passage of the act were considerably lower than the corresponding maximum rates fixed by the legislature. The average rates fixed by the law were higher than the rates at which the railroads had previously carried a large portion of corresponding freight. The revenues of the road were not even curtailed by this law; on the contrary, by equalizing rates, _i. e._, by leveling up the rates given to favored places and favored individuals and leveling down the exorbitant rates exacted from the public at non-competitive points, the railroad companies were enabled to effect an increase in their total revenue.