The opinion of the Court, written by Justice Brewer, who, as Federal circuit judge, had already taken advanced ground in favor of judicial review, went the whole length in upholding the right of the judiciary to review the reasonableness, not only of a rate fixed by a commission, as in the case in hand, but even of one fixed by the legislature. The case differed in no essential way, declared the justice, from those cases in which it had been the age-long practice of the judiciary to act as final arbiters of reasonableness--cases in which a charge exacted by a common carrier was attacked by a shipper or passenger as unreasonable. The difference between the two cases was merely that in the one the rate alleged to be unreasonable was fixed by the carrier; in the other it was fixed by the commission or by the legislature. In support of this remarkable bit of legal reasoning, the opinion adduced as precedents merely a few brief excerpts, from previous decisions of the Court, nearly all of which were pure _dicta_. The absence of any dissent from this opinion, in spite of the fact that Judge Gray, who had concurred in Justice Bradley's vigorous dissenting opinion in the Chicago-Minnesota case four years before, was still on the bench, indicates that the last lingering opposition to the doctrine of judicial review in the minds of any of the Court had been dissolved. Henceforth it was but the emphatic affirmation and consistent development of that doctrine that was to be expected. If we leave out of account Mr. Justice Brewer's _dicta_ and consider the Court to have decided merely the issues squarely presented, the Reagan case left much to be done before the doctrine of judicial review could be regarded as established beyond all possibility of limitation and serious qualification. Other cases on the point followed quickly, but it was not until the celebrated case of Smyth _v._ Ames, decided in 1898, that the two leading issues were fairly presented and settled. In this case the rate attacked was not fixed by a commission, but by a state legislature itself; and the rate was not admitted by the counsel for the state to be unreasonable, but was strongly defended as wholly reasonable and just. The Court had to meet the issues.