[63] Senator Caminetti on February 12 introduced a concurrent resolution calling for the removal of the present Board of Railroad Commissioners from office. The Committee on Corporations reported adversely, and on March 15th the resolution was finally rejected. Chapter XIII. Machine Defeats the Stetson Bill. Southern Pacific Attorney Succeeds in Clouding the Issue - Railroad Claquers Active in Advocating the Maximum Rate, Which Was Designated as Little Better Than No Rate At All - No Fight Over the Bill in the Assembly. Having succeeded in transferring the railroad regulation measures from the Senate Judiciary Committee, the majority of whose members were 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" appears in the State Constitution. Article XII, Section 22, of the Constitution, provides that the Railroad Commissioners "shall have the power and it shall be their duty to establish rates of charges for the transportation of passengers and freight by railroad or other transportation companies."