Burnett, the eleventh member of the Committee, was absent. Gradually it dawned upon Walker, Miller and Roseberry that this meant the favorable recommendation of the Wright bill. The next moment that fact was hammered into them by the Committee deciding by the same vote, 7 to 3, to recommend that the Stetson bill do not pass; and that the Wright bill do pass. The machine had won the opening skirmish in the railroad regulation controversy. Incidentally it had come out in the open squarely for the Wright bill. From that moment the machine Senators labored openly for the passage of the measure. However, the machine was not yet out of the woods with its Railroad Regulation bill. The Senate Judiciary Committee had still to pass upon it, and the majority of the Judiciary Committee was anti-machine. Wright followed the same course in the Judiciary Committee as he had taken in the Committee on Corporations, namely, moved that it be the sense of the Committee that the Railroad Regulation bill to be favorably considered by the Committee should provide for the maximum rate. Wright's motion was, however, lost by a vote of 8 to 10. The Committee not only rejected the maximum rate, but endorsed the absolute rate, thus reversing the Committee on Corporations. The vote by which this was done was as follows: Against the maximum rate, against the Wright bill and for the Stetson bill - Campbell, Cutten, Miller, Stetson, Thompson, Caminetti, Boynton, Roseberry, Curtin and Cartwright - 10. For the maximum rate, for the Wright bill and against the Stetson bill - Anthony, Martinelli, McCartney, Wright, Willis, Wolfe, Burnett and Estudillo - 8. Absent - Savage - 1. Thus the Stetson bill after two months of machine effort against it, went to the floor of the Senate from the Judiciary Committee with the recommendation that it "do pass." Of the forty Senators, nineteen were lawyers, and every one of the nineteen was a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee. Thus the majority of the lawyers of the Senate, in spite of the confusion which the machine claquers had created, were willing to take their chances on the constitutionality of the Stetson bill. But in fairness it must be admitted that members of the Judiciary Committee who voted for the absolute rate provision of the Stetson bill were still in the befuddled condition in which Peter F. Dunne's sophistry had left them. Senator Miller, for example, in explaining his vote for the absolute rate, said: "I take this stand, not that I am convinced that the Supreme Court will decide the absolute rate to be constitutional; I fear that it may not. But the maximum rate is little better than no rate at all. I wish the absolute rate provided in this bill, that the Supreme Court may be given opportunity to pass upon it."