to function at all, and second that the principle of regulation by the state is so thoroughly established by this time as to be removed from the field of controversial argument; while the perplexing factor of many and ofttimes annoying conflicts between the State regulatory bodies, or between them and the Federal Interstate Commerce Commission, is being solved automatically by the steadily increasing usurpation of the individual rights of the various States by the centralized government at Washington.

The problems upon which I shall prefer to linger in this book are those that concern the physical side of our national railroad structure, future as well as present, its operating problems as well as its purely human ones, in these last including not merely the very human problem of the men and women who work upon the railroad but those who ride upon it or otherwise become its patrons. Granting the great importance of its questions of finance and of state regulation, I still feel that these last are of still greater portent to its future. With these properly solved, finance and regulation, to a large extent at least, will solve themselves. A national railroad structure well operated, with efficiency, with economy, with vision, with a broad human relationship, will not have to worry very much about the sale of its securities or about interference from fussy regulatory bodies. I think that this may be fairly set down as a fundamental fact in our argument.

As to what constitutes good operation, efficiency, economy, vision, broad human relationship, there will of course come more than one opportunity for an honest difference of opinion. It is in the sincere effort to gain the real current of forward-looking opinion upon these great questions of our national transportation problem that the writer for the last sixteen years has traveled many thousands of miles across the United States and Canada and has interviewed hundreds of people in railroad circles and out. For more than a dozen years past he has foreseen the present crisis. The coming of the World War hastened it a bit perhaps but the crisis was inevitable. A drifting policy, which ofttimes was no policy at all, followed by both the railroad and the various groups of persons that assumed to control it, has brought us almost to the edge of supreme catastrophe.

Go back with me once again to the beginning. Remember if you will that the railroad in the United States to-day is a little more than ninety years old. For eighty of those years it was in a state of steady and healthy development and progress. For the last ten or twelve of them it has not only been in a state of arrested development but narrowly approaching entrance into a state of decadence.

For eighty years the American railroad grew, and grew heartily. It financed its own growth and, consisting very largely of independent units, financed itself quite readily and as a rule locally. It kept its physical facilities, track and rolling-stock and all the rest of it, abreast if not ahead of actual traffic requirements. About the beginning of the present century, as presently we shall see, it began to feel the burden of greatly increased material costs, and of taxation also. It met these added costs, without any very visible addition to its revenues, by holding rather tightly down on its pay-roll and by adopting large operating efficiencies and economies. For a while these sufficed. They had to suffice. Appeals to the State and Federal regulatory commissions for increased rates were generally vetoed pretty promptly. Since the establishment of the Interstate Commerce Commission in 1887 these regulatory boards had increased steadily in strength and in prestige. They felt their oats. And many did not hesitate to deny the applications of the roads for rate increases.

In 1906 something happened which in later years was to loom large in American railroad history. Congress, under a considerable pressure from President Theodore Roosevelt, passed the so-called Hepburn Bill, radically amending the Interstate Commerce Act and giving the I. C. C. an almost unbridled authority over railroad rates. The Interstate Commerce Commission could not itself authorize changes in the tariffs of the carriers but it could, and frequently did, veto any changes that the roads themselves saw fit to make.

Parenthetically it may be stated that even though this increase of power granted to the big Federal commission stirred up something of a competitive energy on the part of the State regulatory commissions to supervise more carefully than ever before the operation of the railroads through their respective bailiwicks, it also marked the long beginning of the end for the State boards; as far at least as our steam railroads are concerned. As I have said already, it is still another of our difficult national question-marks in which the old, old problem of States’ rights again shows its disagreeable face. Eventually it probably will be ended by shearing these State boards of virtually if not absolutely all of their supervision over interstate railroads; and the I. C. C. long since has shown marvelous ways in which this phrase may be extended to cover even the tiniest of apparent intra-state lines.

The passage of the Hepburn Bill put the first quietus upon the development of the carriers. Soon after, they began to cease large additions to their plants, even though the nation that they served went steadily ahead in its development, by leaps and by bounds. Yet for full ten years after 1906 the net earnings of the carriers continued to increase, in pace with the great growth of the nation and its industries in those selfsame years, until under the war stress of 1916 and 1917 they had come to the astounding total of almost a billion dollars a year “net operating income,” which under the rigorous accounting systems of the Interstate Commerce Commission signifies the amounts available for paying interest and dividends and making permanent improvements. In other words the deterioration of the national railroad structure had begun well before the maximum of net earnings had been reached, and by the end of 1917 had reached so serious a stage as to threaten a possible breakdown—I am using this last word advisedly—or at best a fearsome congestion and uselessness, in the face of one of the gravest national crises that the United States has ever had to meet.

Confronted with such a possibility President Wilson did not hesitate. He took no chances. With the supreme powers which were his as the war leader of the nation he reached out and took over the railroads and made them a direct agency of the national conduct of the war, under the name of the United States Railroad Administration, placing them under the direct and autocratic control of William G. McAdoo, secretary of the treasury and a man with not only a large knowledge of railroad finance but with a degree of success as an actual railroad operator—of the short but busy Hudson and Manhattan rapid transit lines connecting New York, Jersey City, Hoboken, and Newark.

There has perhaps been no single activity of the Wilson administration and its conduct of the war more seriously discussed and criticized than its control of the railroads. Even the gigantic expenditures and manifest blunders of the Shipping Board have been passed quickly by, to linger upon those of Mr. McAdoo and his fellows in the Railroad Administration. Yet when all has been fairly considered the Railroad Administration in its brief twenty-six months of life accomplished some very creditable things, and some not so creditable—some of these obvious, some others most unexpected and strangely outré. It was obvious for instance that a highly centralized, automatic, and supreme control could obtain large operating economies by completely