Observers noted that fortunes which outstripped the possessions of princes were being amassed for the few by combinations which sometimes, if not frequently, resorted to illegal and unfair practices, and they compared these conditions with the labor unrest, the discontent and the poverty which was the lot of the many. In the meanwhile there had arisen a growing demand for action which would give relief from the conditions just described. As early as 1879 the Hepburn committee appointed by the New York Assembly had investigated the railroads and had made public a mass of information concerning the relation of the transportation system to the industrial combinations. In 1880 Henry George had published _Progress and Poverty_ in which he had contended that the entire burden of taxation should be laid upon land values, in order to overcome the advantage which the ownership of land gave to monopoly. In 1881 Henry D. Lloyd had fired his first volley, "The Story of a Great Monopoly," an attack on the Standard Oil Company which was published in the _Atlantic Monthly_ and which caused that number of the periodical to go through seven editions.[2] In 1888 Edward Bellamy's _Looking Backward_ had pictured a socialized Utopian state in which the luxuries as well as the necessities of life were produced for the common benefit of all the people. Societies had been formed for the propagation of Bellamy's ideas, and the parlor study of socialism had become popular. The platforms of the political parties had given evidence of a continuing unrest without presenting any definite proposals for relief. As far back as 1872 the Labor Reformers had condemned the "capitalists" for importing Chinese laborers; in the same year the Republicans and Democrats had opposed further grants of public land to corporations and monopolies--referring in the main to the railroads; in 1880 the Greenbackers and in 1884 the Anti-Monopolists, the Prohibitionists and the Democrats had denounced the corporations and called for government action to prevent or control them; and in 1888 the Union Labor party, the Prohibitionists and the Republicans had urged legislation for doing away with or regulating trusts and monopolies. By 1890 eight states had already passed anti-trust laws. Among unorganized forces, possibly the independent producers were as effective as any. Although usually overcome by the superior strength of their big opponents, they frequently conducted vigorous contests and sometimes carried the issue to the courts where damaging evidence was made public.