anti-machine, to the Committee on Corporations, the majority of whose
members were machine, the machine proceeded to discredit the Stetson
bill, by making it appear that the State Constitution by implication
prohibits the fixing of absolute railroad rates, and provides that the
Railroad Commissioners may fix maximum rates only. Peter F. Dunne was
brought to Sacramento to make this argument before the Senate Committee
on Corporations.

Dunne, in his address, showed greater ability than integrity. When he
had finished, even the anti-machine members of the Committee were
completely befuddled. Walker, one of the members of the Committee who is
not a lawyer, groped in utter darkness thereafter, until he finally
stumbled into the arms of Eddie Wolfe and Frank Leavitt and Jere Burke,
when the final vote on the railroad bills was taken. It was Walker's
only stumble of the session. But for his unfortunate vote against the
Stetson bill and for the Wright bill, Walker would have made an
exceptionally clean record.

Not only did Dunne befog the lay Senators of the Committee, he shook the
faith of men like Miller and Roseberry - both lawyers - on the
constitutionality of the absolute rate. Miller recognizes that the
absolute rate is the only practical rate; but until the end of the
session he was not prepared to say that it could be constitutionally
established. Dunne certainly did a good job. To be sure, his address was
a mass of misrepresentations, but of misrepresentations cunningly put.
He shattered the implicit faith of the anti-machine Senators in the
absolute rate. And that was what he had been sent to Sacramento to do.
The evil that Dunne did lived long after he had left the capital.

Curiously enough, neither the term "absolute rate" nor "maximum rate"