Several comments are necessary. First, about ⅘ of the Commission’s decisions have been right on the railroad’s own showing. They claim only 32 reversals out of 170 orders—nearly all the rest have been accepted by the railroads or enforced upon them by the courts. Second, the reversals have been based on questions of law in respect to which the courts disagreed among themselves. The Commission has not been overruled in respect to questions of fact, but on the application of what it believed to be law (and what the framers of the law believed to be law) to the removal of economic abuses. Third, the points of law in respect to which it has been overruled are very few. The decisions have gone in bunches. For instance while the Alabama Midland long and short haul case was pending in the courts a number of other long-haul cases were decided by the Commission, and when, after several years, the Supreme Court gave final judgment, a whole block of the Commission’s rulings on this point were discredited and subsequent reversals were simply repetitions involving no new error. So the question of power to fix rates covers a cluster of cases all thrown down in reality by one ruling.[404] And these two questions represent nearly the whole difference between the courts and the Commission. The 15 reversals in the Supreme Court do not mean 15 errors, even in respect to legal points, but only a very few errors if any. Fourth, the higher court reversed the lower in 9 out of the 17 cases that went up from the Circuit Court, and in three of these cases the Supreme Court reversed both the Circuit Court and the Court of Appeals. Fifth, it is by no means certain that the Commission was wrong and the court right. The fact is that the Supreme Court has not interpreted the law according to its manifest and well-known intent, but in a narrow, technical way that has defeated in large part the real purpose of the law. It is an absurdity to rule that the law is valid and then to decide that the railroads may escape from the long-haul section by means of dissimilar circumstances created by themselves. And many believe it to be an equal absurdity to declare that the Commission may order the discontinuance, of an excessive rate or unjust discrimination, but cannot fix a reasonable rate.