form of discrimination.

One more step was necessary in order to eradicate completely this
mischievous condition and to "keep the highway of commerce open
to all on equal terms." It was imperative that the law relative
to these abuses should be enforced. On this point Roosevelt's own
words are significant: "Although under the decision of the courts
the National Government had power over the railways, I found,
when I became President, that this power was either not exercised
at all or exercised with utter inefficiency. The law against
rebates was a dead letter. All the unscrupulous railway men had
been allowed to violate it with impunity; and because of this, as
was inevitable, the scrupulous and decent railway men had been
forced to violate it themselves, under penalty of being beaten by
their less scrupulous rivals. It was not the fault of these
decent railway men. It was the fault of the Government."

Roosevelt did not propose that this condition should continue to
be the fault of the Government while he was at its head, and he
inaugurated a vigorous campaign against railways that had given
rebates and against corporations that had accepted--or
extorted-them. The campaign reached a spectacular peak in a
prosecution of the Standard Oil Company, in which fines
aggregating over $29,000,000 were imposed by Judge Kenesaw M.
Landis of the United States District Court at Chicago for the
offense of accepting rebates. The Circuit Court of Appeals
ultimately determined that the fine was improperly large, since
it had been based on the untenable theory that each shipment on
which a rebate was paid constituted a separate offense. At the
second trial the presiding judge ordered an acquittal. In spite,