The attitude in which the Pennsylvania road and the Commission were thus placed towards each other was this: Shall the Pennsylvania Railroad be allowed to make a charge which the Commission volunteered to rebuke it for making, and which it had decided, in the parallel case of another road in the same situation, was altogether unwarranted and must cease? They stood thus facing each other more than two years. There was apparently no excuse for delay the Commission would not accept. At one time it granted postponement on the plea of a lawyer that his father was sick. More than the lawyer's father were sick; a whole community of business men were sick; the entire country was sick, its industry, law, politics, morals--all. The administration of justice was sick. If the facts had been uncertain, or the law undetermined, the course of justice would still have seemed cruelly sluggish; but here was a matter in which the facts and the law in question had been settled, and by the Commission itself, over and over again. The only thing remaining was that the Pennsylvania Railroad, as well as the road which was its next neighbor, must obey the law. The railroad against which the Interstate Commerce Commission decided in 1890 on this point joined the Pennsylvania at Irvineton and Corry. The Commission put the law into force on one side of those points, but for two years gave the Pennsylvania Railroad and others "rehearings" and other means of delay, and did not open its lips to say that the same law must reign on the other. The conduct of this corporation meant that it intended to respect neither the Interstate Commerce Commission nor the Interstate Commerce law; that it recognized the will of cliqued wealth as the supreme law; that the protestations of loyalty to the law and the Commission with which it accompanied its defiance of both were not offered as a disguise of respect, but were chosen as a method which would most embarrass the people's tribunal in upholding itself and the rights of the citizens. All that was needed by those who had contrived and were continuing the wrong was time--they had everything else. Time they got, and plenty of it.