prevention of unjust discrimination. As a regulative measure the law proved inadequate, its most important provisions being emasculated by court decisions, and the century ended with effective railway regulation unaccomplished.

No less pressing than the problem of regulating railroads, over which the internal commerce of the nation was carried on, was the question of regulating the great industrial combinations through which a large part of the buying and selling of the products of the country was controlled. The unfair advantages secured by large combinations because of their abundance of capital and the discriminating favors of railroads enabled them often to throttle competition and to establish monopolies that were a menace to the public. This situation likewise called forth federal legislative measures intended to prevent the monopolization of trade. Previous to 1900, however, but little application of the law was made.

To the tariff and to the currency the nation owed its most bitter political struggles after the reconstruction of the Union was accomplished. The net result of a half dozen efforts to modify the tariff was the existence, at the end of a century, of a tariff law in which the general average of duties was 10 per cent higher than the average at the close of the Civil War. The currency system of the nation, with the exception of the improvement in banking, became worse instead of better after the war, the chief trouble arising because of the adoption of measures intended to satisfy insistent demands for a greater volume of money, without making provision for its retirement when business conditions were such as to warrant a contraction of circulation. A quarter of a century of struggle finally ended in the overthrow of the advocates of the unlimited issue of cheap money, but no attempt was made before 1900 to remedy the inelasticity of the national currency or to check the tendency toward a concentration of the control of credit in a few financial centers. In 1873 and in 1893 the country suffered from money panics, the latter one being due almost entirely to unwise financial measures that had virtually bankrupted the government and destroyed confidence in the money it issued.

The end of the century was reached with only a little headway made in the solution of the most vital economic problems. In striking contrast to the "golden age" of American history, noted for the absence of both pauperism and great riches, this period saw the development of the extremes of poverty and wealth, and, furthermore, an ever-growing tendency toward the concentration of the national wealth under the control of a few powerful interests. The disregard which too many of these interests evinced for the welfare of the general public and the power which they possessed to thwart the efforts of the public to protect itself created most of the great questions which confronted the nation—questions of such serious nature as to dim the record of achievement and material progress from 1860 to 1900.