Another railroad president turns the lime-light of mathematical analysis on the errors of the Commission. David Willcox, President of the Delaware and Hudson, says: “About 93 percent of the decisions of the Commission which have been passed upon by the courts have been held to be erroneous. In case, therefore, the Commission had the future rate-fixing power, so far as its decisions were in force until the courts passed upon them, injustice would be accomplished in 93 percent of the cases. For this there would be no remedy, because no recovery could be had from those whose goods had been carried at unjustly low rates.”[400] We shall see that this statement gives too strong an impression of the capacity of the Commission for mistakes, but there is no doubt that it has made mistakes, that any person or persons attempting to fix rates, even the railroad managers themselves, are liable to make mistakes, and that losses result to the roads from their own mistakes and might naturally result from the mistakes of a commission or court if its erroneous orders were enforced upon them. It may be said that if the orders of the Commission went into force immediately it would be the interest of the railroads to hasten the proceedings in court instead of prolonging them indefinitely as they are too apt to do, and that with reasonable provisions for prompt adjudication and the stimulus of powerful railroad interests in that direction, the delay of the law, or this branch of it, at least, would vanish. It may also be said that the railroads could recoup themselves for the losses under discussion by curtailing the service they render for the new rates, or by raising other rates not fixed by the Commission. But the Commission might veto the raising of other rates, and the entailment of service would be very undesirable. The question arises whether it would not be fair for the public to stand any loss clearly resulting from an improper order of its Commission, or else require that any order the validity of which is questioned should be passed upon by the court before it is put into effect? The Commission is itself perhaps a sufficient court in respect to questions of fact, and if it were arranged that in case of dispute on a question of law the Commission might call upon the Supreme Court for an immediate interpretation of the law, the rulings of the Commission could be squared with the law at the start, and the danger of loss from an erroneous order would be reduced to a minimum. As above remarked, the mistakes of the Commission have not been so vast as the reader might infer from the percentage of overruled cases stated by President Willcox. The work of the Commission may be summarized as follows: