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l consists of commuters, commercial travelers, men on business trips, and persons traveling for pleasure; in proportion about in the order I have given them. If these figures show anything, they show that the great bulk of our passenger mileage is used by a class which we may call constant travelers. I believe that it is a reasonably safe assumption that at least four-fifths of the 35,000,000,000 passenger-miles made last year were used by this class of travel, probably representing less than 10,000,000 of the population of the country. This same 35,000,000,000 of passenger-miles distributed equally among our entire population produces 357 passenger-miles per individual.

"I myself have always maintained that the passenger revenues of our railroads do not render their proportion of the cost of operation. The Interstate Commerce Commission has upheld the same contention, as anyone can see by its recent decision granting increases in passenger rates proportionately much higher than the increases in freight rates. These figures of mine show how a privileged class, representing ten per cent, or, at the widest calculation, not more than twenty per cent of the population, have been receiving transportation at far less than the actual cost; while the remaining ninety per cent of the citizens of the United States have paid the freight--literally."

The railroader's figures are interesting--to say the least. And we must assume that he has not forgotten the fact that there is one great economic difference between the freight and the passenger traffic. The one must move, and, save in the few cases where waterborne traffic competes, move by rail; a large part of the other is shy and must be induced. If this were not true the big railroads would be advertising for freight business as steadily and as strongly as they advertise for passengers. Of course a large proportion of folk travel because necessity so compels, yet there is a goodly proportion, a proportion to be translated into many thousands of dollars, who travel upon the railroad because the price is low enough to appeal to their bargain-sense. In this great class must always be included the excursionists of every class. These folk must be lured by attractive rates. And as a class they are particularly susceptible just now to the charms of the railroad's great new competitor--the automobile.

It was only two or three years ago that the round-trip ticket at considerably less than the cost of two single-trip tickets and the twenty-dollar mileage book, entitling the bearer to 1,000 miles of transportation, prevailed in the eastern and more closely populated portion of the United States. The price of the mileage book was raised to .50. Within a short time it is likely to go to . And there are shrewd traffic men among the railroad executives of the country who today say that within twenty years it will cost five cents a mile to ride upon the railroad--as against an average fare of two and a half cents today. And I do not think that, in view of the advances in cost--as well as that great necessity in making good that loss in both physical and human equipment, to which I have already referred--the public will make any large protest. The average man does not wish to ride upon a railroad that is neglecting either its property or its employees. He is willing to pay a larger price for his transportation if only he is assured that this larger price is going to make his travel more safe and more comfortable in every way.

Therefore I do not think that it is going to be very hard for the railroads to gain necessary advances in fares--particularly if they will not forget one big thing. The success of the Twentieth Century Limited and the other trains of its class ought not to be lost upon the railroader. With service he can trade for increased rates. There are many large opportunities for the railroad along these lines, in both freight and passenger service. A progressive desire to enter into these opportunities will probably bring the railroad many of the advances that it so sorely needs. And I am not sure but that such a spirit would also do much toward securing for it the very necessary unification of regulation--not alone of its income but also of its outgo--that it so earnestly seeks at the present time.

REGULATION

At the time that these lines are being written the railroads of the United States are entering a veritable no man's land. The ponderous Newlands committee of Congress has begun its hearing and accomplished little; so little that it has asked and received an extension of time of nearly eleven months in which to go into the entire question more thoroughly. We all hope it does. The Adamson bill, establishing the so-called eight-hour day for certain favored classes of railroad employees, is statute, but its constitutionality is yet to be established. And the railroads are preparing to fight it, in its present form, and to the bitter end. General sympathy seems to be with them; it is quite probable that even the four brotherhoods that fought for the measure--unlike the Pears Soap boy--are not quite happy now that they have received it.

In the midst of all this confusion President Wilson, assured of a second term of office and so of a reasonable opportunity to try to put a concrete plan into effect, has emerged with his definite program, not radically different from that which he evolved last August at the time of the biggest of all crises between the railroads and their labor, but which was warped and disfigured until its own father might not know it. His plan, as now is generally known, provides not alone for the eight-hour day for all classes of railroad employees, but includes the most important feature of compulsory arbitration referred to in an earlier chapter.

It now looks as if the United States was upon the threshold of the eight-hour day--in many, many forms of its industrial life. I believe that, in his heart, the average railroader--executive or employee--favors it, fairly and honestly and efficiently applied. It has been charged as the first large step forward toward the government operation of our railroads, yet I cannot see it as nearly as large a step as the extension of the maximum weight of packages entrusted to the parcel post, a system which if further extended--and apparently both legally and logically extended--might enable a man to go up to Scranton and place enough postage stamps upon the sides of a carload of coal to send it to his factory siding at tidewater. Compared with this the eight-hour day is as nothing as a step toward government operation or ownership. A genuine eight-hour day is, of course, a long step toward the nationalization of our railroads--quite a different matter, if you please.

President Wilson's entire plan, as it has already been briefly outlined, forms a very definite step toward such nationalization. It at once supersedes the indefinite quality of the Newlands committee hearings--no more indefinite at that than the average hearing of a legislative committee. When the Wilson plan has been adopted, fully and squarely and honestly, either by this Congress or by the next, it will then be the order of the day to take up some of the next steps, not so much, perhaps, toward the nationalization of our railroads as toward the further bettering of their efficiency and their broadening to take advantage of some of their great latent opportunities as carriers of men and of goods.

The men who control our railroads today look forward to such a definite program with hope, but not without some misgivings. For, after all, we are by no means nationally efficient, and there seems to be a wide gulf between the making of our economic plans and their execution. No wonder, then, that the railroads are dubious. They are uncertain. They have been advised and threatened and legislated and regulated until they are in a sea of confusion, with apparently no port ahead. The extent of the confusion is indicated not alone by their failure to handle the traffic that has come pouring in upon them in the last days of the most active industrial period that America ever has known, but by the failure of their securities to appeal to the average investor--a statement which is easily corroborated by a study of recent Wall Street reports. And what would be a bad enough situation at the best has been, of course, vastly complicated by the labor situation.

We already have reviewed some of the salient features of that situation; we have seen, of organized labor, the engineer and the conductor at work; and of unorganized labor, the section-boss and the station agent. We have seen the equality of their work and the inequality of their wage. It is futile now to attempt to discuss what might have happened if the pay envelopes of all these four typical classes of railroad employees had been kept nearer parity. As a matter of fact the disagreeable and threatening situation between the railroads and the employees of their four brotherhoods is largely of their own making. If, in the past, the railroads had done either one of two things there probably would be no strike threats today, no Adamson legislation, no president of the United States placed even temporarily in an embarrassing and somewhat humiliating position. The railroads, in the succession of "crises," as we have already studied them, must have foreseen the inevitable coming of the present situation. They could have fought a strike--and perhaps won it--at any time better in the past than at the present. The brotherhoods have gained strength and the efficiency of unison more rapidly than the railroads. And even if the railroads at some time in the past had fought the issue and lost it, they at least would have had the satisfaction of having fought a good fight and an honest one. Institutions are builded quite as frequently on defeats as upon successes.

Or the railroads might have sedulously recognized the nonunion worker in their ranks and by a careful devotion to his position and his pay envelope kept his progress equal to that of his unionized brother. True, that would have cost more in the first place, but it now looks as if the railroad would have to pay the amount in the last place--and the accrued interest is going to be sizable.

It is not yet too late to do this last thing; it is a principle for which the railroaders should fight, into the last ditch. The greatest of the many fundamental weaknesses of the Adamson bill is the bland way in which it ignores this principle--the way in which, as we already have seen, it singles out the four great brotherhoods for the generous protection of the so-called "eight-hour day," and leaves all the other railroad workers out in the cold. Or is it a method of proselyting by which the four brotherhoods hope to force the other branches of railroad workers into organization?

It is not too late for the men who control our railroads to offset such brutal forms of proselyting by raising the status of their unorganized labor--voluntarily and in advance of possible legislation, if you please; with a generosity of heart that cannot fail to make a warm appeal to public sentiment. It is not too late for our railroads, on their own part, to consider labor from as scientific and as modern a viewpoint as they do their physical and financial problems. It is not too late for them to raise up high executives who shall make labor, its emoluments and its privileges, its possibilities of evolution their whole study. In an earlier chapter of this book we discussed this matter in detail; called attention to the lack of new blood of the right sort coming to the ranks of the railroad, to the opportunity of fixing wages upon a purely scientific as well as a cost-of-living basis; suggested even the broad possibilities of the bonus system as well as the abandonment of the complicated double basis of payment to trainmen which has crept into effect.

Upon these foundations the pay envelopes of the railroad worker in the future must be figured. If the railroads themselves are incapable of so establishing it--and in full fairness to them it must be stated that the time may have passed when they were capable of accomplishing this, unaided at least--then the national government must step in and do it. The Interstate Commerce Commission may be asked to establish, with compulsory arbitration, not only a minimum but a maximum rate which the railroad may pay its various classes of employees--and so still another great step will be taken in the nationalization of our system of transportation. Call it socialism, if you like; I do not, but I do feel that it is another large step toward nationalization.

Moreover, the very consideration of the topic brings us at once to the greatest immediate necessity of the railroad--unified regulation.

Unified regulation is the crux of the railroad situation today, from the railroad executive's, the investor's, and the patron's point of view. Your wiser executive is holding the question of increased rates in abeyance for the moment. He is devoting his best thought and his best energy toward simplifying and bettering railroad control. He has a frank, honest motive in so doing. Not only will he build toward permanence of the great national institution with which he is connected but he will begin also to induce Capital--the wherewithal with which to build up properties and pay-rolls and possibilities--to come once again toward the bedside of the sick man.

Capital is a sensitive creature. Conservative is far too mild a word to apply to it. Capital takes few chances. And the steady and continued talk of the plight of the railroad has driven Capital away from the bedside of the sick man. Yet Capital, if unwilling to take chances, rarely overlooks Opportunity. And if Capital be convinced that Opportunity is really beckoning to the Railroad, that fair treatment is to be accorded to the patient at last, he will return there himself and place his golden purse in the sick man's hand. Only the wary Capital will demand assurances--he will demand that the Railroad's two nurses, Labor and Regulation, be asked to mend their manners and that that fine old physician, Public Sentiment, be called to the bedside.

Let us cease speaking in parables, and come to the point:

Railroad regulation today is, of course, an established factor in the economic existence of this nation. Already it is all but fundamental. It came as a necessity at the end of the constructive and destructive period of American railroading. I connote these two adjectives advisedly, for while the railroad in a physically constructive sense was being built it also was doing its very best to destroy its competitors. It had hardly attained to any considerable size before the natural processes of economic evolution began to assert themselves. Certain roads, stronger than others, still stronger grew. And as they stronger grew, the sense of power, the economic value of power, came home the more clearly to them. To gain power meant, first of all, the crushing of their opponents, if not by one means then by another.

This is not the time or place to discuss the great evils that arose from the unbridled savagery of cut-throat competition in the seventies, the eighties, and the early nineties. The whole rotten record of rebates, of sinister political advantages gained through bribery of one form or another, has long since been bared. The illegitimate use of the railroad pass in itself makes a very picturesque chapter of this record.

Such a condition of affairs could not go forward indefinitely. In this day and age it is a wonder that it existed as long as it did exist. Out of this turmoil and seething chaos was born Railroad Regulation. She was a timid creature at first, gradually feeling her increasing strength, however, and not hesitating to use it. For a long time she had a dangerous enemy, a fellow who up to that time had allied himself almost invariably with railroads and railroaders--the practical politician. Eventually this fellow took upon himself the r?le of best friend to Railroad Regulation.

The effect of the railroad pass upon the dishonest newspapers was only a little less potent than upon the dishonest politician. Put in its kindliest light it was a softening influence in the editorial sanctum. When it was gone a sterner spirit began to assert itself in a large portion of the press. The railroad was being called to account for its sins more sharply than ever before. And a smarting politician who went before a legislature with some measure striking hard at a railroad could be reasonably assured of a large measure of support from the Fourth Estate.

In the golden age of journalism both editors and reporters spent their vacations in delightful, but distant, points. It was a pretty poor sort of journalist who paid his fare when he wished to ride upon the cars. Generally his own office took care of his rather extensive and extravagant demands for travel. If, however, he happened to be employed upon one of the few honest newspapers who had conscientious scruples about accepting free transportation, either wholesale or retail, from the railroads, he generally had recourse to the local politicians. There were aldermen in New York, in Philadelphia, and in Chicago, undoubtedly politicians in numerous other cities, who carried whole pads of blank railroad passes in their pockets. It was only necessary for them to fill these out to have them good for immediate transportation. The effect of this transportation upon the political welfare of the railroads in city halls, in courthouses, in state capitols, even in the national capitol itself--can well be imagined.

There was another evidence of this golden stream of free transportation. It was having a notable effect upon the passenger revenues of the railroads, particularly in the relation of these revenues to the cost of operating the trains. It was no unusual thing for a popular evening train from some state metropolis up to its capital, to be chiefly filled with deadheads. The railroads grew alarmed at the situation. It was beginning to overwhelm them. They looked for someone to help them out of it. They found that someone in Railroad Regulation--that spiritual young creature who had been brought into the world and clothed with honesty and idealism. Railroad Regulation came to their aid. Railroad Regulation abolished the pass--the illegitimate use of the pass, at any rate. Long before this time she had made rebating and bribery cardinal and unforgivable sins.

The effect upon the dishonest politician as well as the dishonest newspaper was pronounced. The reaction was instant. If this new creature, Railroad Regulation, possessed so vast a strength, the roads should be taught to feel it. They would be shown exactly where they stood. And so it was that viciousness, revenge, and a crafty knowledge of the inborn dislike of the average human mind to the overwhelming and widespread corporation seized upon Railroad Regulation.

Now the railroads were indeed to be regulated. The spiritual creature was given not one iron hand but eventually forty-six. In addition to the Interstate Commerce Commission down at Washington, each of forty-five separate states gradually created for themselves local railroad-regulating commissions. The efficiency of these boards was a variable quality--to say the least. But if each of them had been gifted with the wisdom of Solomon as well as with the honesty of Moses, the plan would not have worked, except to the great detriment of the welfare of the railroads. No railroader today will deny that it has worked in just such detrimental fashion. He will tell you of instance after instance of the conflicts of authority between the various regulatory boards of the various states through which his property operates; of the still further instances where these conflict with the rulings and orders of the Federal board at Washington.

Railroaders have large faith in the Interstate Commerce Commission. They believe that is both fair and able, a great deal more able than most of the state regulatory boards. Yet even if all the state boards were as efficient as those of Massachusetts or Wisconsin--to make two shining examples--the system still would be a bad one. Today these state boards, in many cases under the influence, the guiding power, or the orders of erratic state legislatures, are imposing strange restrictions upon the railroads under their control. In sixteen states there are laws regulating the type of caboose a freight train must haul. Linen covers are required for head rests in the coaches in one commonwealth; in another they are forbidden as unsanitary. Oklahoma and Arkansas are neighbors, but their regulations in regard to the use of screens in the day coaches of their railroads are not at all neighborly. In one of them screens are required; in the other, absolutely forbidden. It, therefore, is hard work to get a train over the imaginary line which separates Arkansas and Oklahoma without fracturing the law. According to a man who has made a careful study of the entire subject, thirty-seven states have diverse laws regulating locomotive bells, thirty-five have laws about whistles and thirty-two have headlight laws. The bells required range from twenty to thirty-five pounds and one state absolutely insists upon an automatic bell-ringing device. The five-hundred candle-power headlights that are good enough for Virginia may be used across the border in Kentucky, but not in North Carolina, which will not permit lights under fifteen-hundred candle-power. And South Carolina insists that the headlight shall be ten-thousand candle-power or a searchlight strong enough to discern a man at eight hundred feet. Nevada goes still further and says that the light must show objects at a distance of a thousand feet.

Even the lowly caboose, the "hack" of the freight-trainmen, has not escaped the attention of state legislators. While many states are quite content with the standard eighteen-foot caboose mounted on a single four-wheel truck, thirteen of them demand a minimum length of twenty-four feet--Missouri twenty-eight and Maine twenty-nine--while fifteen insist that there must be two of the four-wheel trucks. The legislators at eight commonwealths have solemnly decreed that caboose platforms be fixed at twenty-four inches in width, Illinois and Missouri require thirty inches, while Iowa and Nebraska are content with eighteen and with twenty inches respectively. A legislator's lot cannot be an entirely happy one when it comes to determining these details of railroad equipment. But then compare his lot with that of the man who must operate the railroad--who finds that one state compels the continuous ringing of the locomotive bell while a train is passing through one of its towns; despite the fact that an adjoining state makes such an act a criminal offense. The life of a man who must operate a railroad over some seven or eight of these states is certainly cast upon no bed of roses.

Yet these are but the smaller troubles which await him. Take the question of the so-called "full-crew" law: Beginning only a very few years ago a wave of legislation swept over the country, compelling the railroads to increase the number of brakemen that they carried upon each of their trains. The carriers protested bitterly against the measure. They said that it was arbitrary, expensive, illogical, unnecessary. But it was indorsed by the labor organizations, and the politicians fell in line. Twenty-two states passed the law. Governors Foss of Massachusetts, Cruce of Oklahoma, and Harmon of Ohio vetoed it. So did Governor Hughes of New York. Later Governor Sulzer of New York signed it. It also became operative in Ohio. The people of Missouri, speaking through their referendum, threw it out. But in twenty states it became and remains statute--a greatly increased operating charge against the railroads which operate through them. The "full-crew" law in Pennsylvania, in New York, and in New Jersey costs the Pennsylvania Railroad an extra 0,000 a year--five per cent, if you please, on ,000,000 worth of capital.

The "full-crew" legislation has been followed more recently by an attempt at legislation regulating the length of trains--freight trains in particular. Some of the men who engineered the first crusade have been responsible for the second. They have volunteered the suggestion that the railroads have sought to offset the effects of the "extra crew" by lengthening the trains. And they have countered by proposing statutes suggesting that all freight trains be limited to fifty cars, about half of the present maximum.

To the average man this will seem as logical as if the state were to step in and tell him how long he must take to reach his office in the morning or how long he must wear a single pair of shoes. To the railroader the injustice of the thing comes home even more sharply. For these ten years or more he has been working to increase the efficiency of his plant. He has believed that one of the straightest paths to this end has been in increasing the capacity of his trains--just as the carrying capacity of merchant ships has steadily been increased. He has made this possible by enlarging his locomotives and his cars, by laying heavier rails, by rebuilding his bridges and by ironing out the curves and reducing the grades in his tracks, by multiplying the capacity of his yards and terminals--all at great cost. These things have made the 100-car, 5,000-ton capacity freight train not merely a possibility, but to his mind an economic necessity as well. And this despite the interesting opinion of Mr. Harrington Emerson which I have given in an earlier chapter.

Last winter, when the state of Illinois seriously considered the legislation limiting train-lengths, the president of one of its greatest railroads went down into the southern part of the state and said:

"Do you wish us to discard these strong new locomotives that we have been building? Do you wish us to return to the small engines of a quarter of a century ago? It would be inefficient, wasteful to use our modern locomotives for the short-length trains. And sooner or later you would have to bear the cost of the discarded equipment. State laws may be erratic. Economic laws never are. They are as fixed as the laws of nature or of science."

And the state of Illinois took heed of what this man and his fellows said and killed the piece of ridiculous legislation. But it is by no means killed in some of the other states of the Union.

The conflicts between state authorities that we noticed already have borne directly upon the railroad's earnings. The conflicting intrastate rates have borne far more deeply and far more dangerously upon them. Indiana long since fixed the demurrage penalty at one dollar a day for each car which a railroad failed to furnish a shipper; North Dakota made it two dollars; while Kansas and North Carolina fixed it at five dollars a day. Unscientific is hardly the word for such rate-making. And how shall one term Kansas' action, withholding passenger-fare legislation until she found whether or not the supreme court of Nebraska would permit the two-cent-a-mile bill of that state to stand?

If these rank discrepancies in the manhandling of rates by the various states affected only their own territories it would be quite bad enough. Unfortunately they play sad and constant havoc with the interstate rates. These are delicate and builded, many times, upon local or state conditions. And this despite the fact that the vast majority of freight traffic is interstate, rather than intrastate. The majority of the grain from the farm lands of Nebraska or Minnesota is not destined for Omaha in the one case, or Minneapolis in the other; yet these sovereign states take upon their solemn shoulders the regulating of grain rates--to the ultimate discomfiture and cost of the other portions of the land.

I have but to refer you to Justice Hughes's decision in the so-called Minnesota rate case. He showed how this arbitrary local outgrowth of the obsolete doctrine of states' rights worked to the utter and absolute detriment of the nation as a whole. And yet in the six long years while that case was pending the Great Northern and Northern Pacific companies lost more than ,000,000--a sum of money never to be recovered from their shippers--as a result of the state's unsustained reductions in freight rates. No better argument has ever been framed for the nationalization of our railroads, for making the powers of the Interstate Commerce Commission absolute and supreme.

No wonder, then, that the railroaders are praying that a way may be found and found soon for lifting the entire authority over them out of the hands of the forty-five present state boards of control--who never have agreed and who apparently can never be made to agree on any one form of procedure--and placing it in the hands of the very competent regulating board down at Washington, enlarged and strengthened for its new burdens. The Interstate Commerce Commission has never shown a tendency toward freak rulings. Its time has been taken with genuinely important matters. On these it has raised itself to its present high degree of efficiency. It has shown itself capable of studying the details of complicated transportation problems and rendering decisions of great practical sense.

But the scope, and therefore the efficiency, of the Interstate Commerce Commission are closely hemmed in by existing laws. The latest "crisis" between the railroads and the four great brotherhoods of their employees brought this limitation sharply to the fore. It is therefore equally essential that the power and scope of the Federal commission be broadened as well as being made superior to those of the state regulating boards. And it is gratifying to note the progress that President Wilson already is making toward the first of these necessary immediate reliefs to the railroads of the land.

If President Wilson shall succeed in persuading Congress that the entire control of the railroads should be placed in the hands of an enlarged and strengthened Interstate Commerce Commission, he will have earned the thanks of every man who has made an honest study into the situation. Such a commission, clothed with the proper powers, could and would do much not only toward relieving the railroads' immediate necessities in regard to both physical betterment and the enlargement of their pay-rolls, but in enabling them to grasp some of the opportunities which we have outlined in previous chapters--opportunities requiring a generous outpouring of money at the beginning. If I mistake not, public sentiment is going to demand that, if the railroads be granted the relief of unified regulation, they shall be prompt in their acceptance of at least some of these great avenues of development.

We have heard much in late years of the banker control of our railroads and of absentee landlordism in their management. The two things are not to be confused. Banker control is not, in itself, a bad thing. Absentee landlordism invariably is. There are good stretches of railroad in every part of the country that today are failing to render not alone the proper income returns to their owners but, what is worse, service to their communities, because of this great canker, this lack of immediate executive control and understanding. And it is significant in this close connection of two phases of the railroad situation that it was the banker control in New York of the one-time Harriman system--the Union Pacific, the Southern Pacific, the Oregon Short Line, etc.--that gave to it at one fell swoop, five presidents--one at San Francisco, one at Omaha, one at Portland, one at Tucson, and one at Houston--each a young, vigorous man equipped with power and ability. The good effects of that far-seeing move--that instant wiping out of the charges of absentee landlordism that were being lodged against the Harriman system--are still being felt.

It is not banker control that is essentially bad for our railroads. It is banker control together with an utter lack of vision, that has cost them so many times their two greatest potential assets--public interest and public sympathy. Banker control plus vision may readily prove itself the best form of control for our carriers. And that our bankers do not entirely lack vision may be argued by the far-seeing and opportunity-grasping way in which our bankers of the newer school are today reaching for American development in South America, in China, in the Philippines, and in other parts of the world.

Back of the President, back of the Newlands committee and its rather dazzling sense of importance, sits the nation. It is far superior to any mere committees of its own choosing and it is weighing the entire railroad situation as perhaps it never before has been weighed. It is considering the enlargement and the strengthening of the Interstate Commerce Commission--together with it a feasible method for the Federal incorporation of our roads--this last a vital necessity in the mind of any man who has ever tried to finance an issue of securities for an interstate property with each separate state trying to place its own regulations--in many cases both onerous and erratic--upon them. With the spirit of Congress willing, there still remains the very large question of how far its power would extend, in attempting either to reduce the power of the state boards or to make them more amenable to the Federal commission. Our states have been most jealous of their sovereign rights. And it is easy to conceive that their aid and cooperation--so very necessary to the success of the entire ultimate project of the nationalization of our railroads--is not to be obtained by the mere wishing.

President Wilson has set the beginnings for the plan and set them well. As I write it is still up to Congress to undo its mischievous legislation which, if it is made to include an eight-hour day, should render a genuine eight-hour day, one applicable to every class of railroad employee--although it would be difficult to imagine a railroad superintendent or general manager or president quitting at the end of the short-term service. They are schooled to harder things.

And with the eight-hour day must come these other things to which we have already referred, not once but several times. First among these are the matters so closely correlated in President Wilson's program that they cannot be separated from the eight-hour day: arbitration--compulsory arbitration, if you please--the strengthening of the power of the government to seize the railroads and operate them in a time of national panic or military necessity, the enlargement of the powers and the personnel of the Interstate Commerce Commission. With all these things accomplished, and the situation just so much strengthened, it will then become the duty of the railroads to reach out more generously toward their opportunities for further development as the transport service of a great and growing people. It will be necessary for them to attract, to train, to reward new executives of every sort; to further their credit by deserving credit, to show outwardly in a more potent way the thing that so many of them have believed they inwardly possess--true efficiency, both for service and for growth.

The sick man is not without his ambitions--you may be sure of that. He sees his opportunities, perhaps more clearly than ever before in the course of his long life. He is anxious to be up and at them. But before this can be done, some of these things, which we have outlined so briefly here, will have to come to pass. There are reckonings to be made, huge doctors' bills to be met--and the American public will have to help meet them.

The alternative?

There are many panaceas suggested; but I fear that most of these are but nostrums. Ingenious, many of them are, nevertheless. And some of them come from men who speak with both authority and experience. One man proposes to have the entire Federal taxes paid through the railroad, which, in turn, would recoup itself through its freight and passenger rates. He makes an interesting case for himself. Another suggests a Federal holding company for all the railroads of the United States and makes his suggestion read so cleverly and so ingeniously that you all but forget that he is drawing only a thin veil over government ownership. Of government ownership I am not going to treat at this time; not more than to say that to almost all American railroaders--big and little, employers and employed, stockholders and bondholders--it represents little less than death itself to the sick man of American business. In my own opinion it is, at the least, a major operation--an operation whose success is extremely dubious.

INDEX

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