the service without the approval of at least one higher official. We may not like it; we may say that such policies will put the road in the hands of a receiver. That is just what the conductors said when we took away from them the privilege of hiring their own brakemen. It will come just the same. We may as well look pleasant and see the bright side. Where employment is made a lifetime business, where admission thereto is restricted to the lower grades and to younger men, public sentiment will not stand for letting the question of a man's livelihood be decided by any one official, however fair and just he may be. Safety and good administration may demand the man's summary suspension from duty by the immediate official or employe in charge. If the man has been in the service a prescribed probationary period his permanent discharge will have to be approved by higher authority. Men will not care to risk having a recommendation for discharge disapproved. They will learn that the more carefully a discharge has been considered the less readily will a reinstatement be made.

Some people think you cannot have military methods and organization on a railroad because it has no guardhouse. This is a mistake. Your old dad, after trying both, finds that railroads, in some respects, have a more powerful discipline than the army. A discipline based on bread and butter, shoes for the baby, love of home, and pride of family, which is the bulwark of the state, has in itself all necessary elements for maximum practical effectiveness.

Reinstatements, unless based on new evidence, are demoralizing to discipline, for the reason that the unworthy employe bumps back to a lower grade some deserving man, whose good service is then reckoned at a discount. Some passenger conductors become so color blind they cannot tell the company's money from their own. They keep down the wrong lead until the auditor derails them at the spotter's switch. The ex-conductor gets hungry, the sympathetic grievance committee, not knowing what is for its own best interests, intercedes. The management, dreaming of loyalty in coming strikes, reinstates the offender. Some young conductor, who, on the strength of his promotion, has married or bought a home, is set back to braking. This causes some brakeman to carry the mail to the extra list. He quits in disgust and another road, less sympathetic, gets the benefit of his training. Other reinstatements follow and more of the younger men quit. Years go on, a rush of business comes. The management look in vain for promotion material and wonder at the seeming ingratitude in quitting of so many good young men whom it was fully intended to promote—in the sweet by and by. This is not the experience of one road, but of many. Let us be just before we are generous.

Speaking of discharged employes, did you ever happen to be in a general office with an ex-passenger conductor, discharged for "unsatisfactory services," but seeking immediate reinstatement; and have an ex-official, who left the service in first-class standing, come in and ask for the next official vacancy? The conductor might succeed, but the official would fall a sacrifice on the shrine of civil service, a fetich because, in its true meaning, so little understood.

I shall string a civil service limited for you on some other time card.

Affectionately, your own

D. A. D.

  LETTER VIII.

EDUCATION OF SEVERAL KINDS.

May 8, 1904.

My Dear Boy:—I happened to meet your general manager the other day, and the way he spoke of the good work you are doing warmed the cockles of my old heart. He said that you couldn't rest easy until you knew more about the division than any other man. This, of course, is as it should be, but it is astonishing how many division superintendents are satisfied to grope along in the dark. Then some fine day the general officials come along on an inspection trip and unintentionally make the superintendent look like thirty cents by the sincere questions they ask about the division which he is unable to answer. If one's memory has not been trained by education it is a good thing to condense information and have it in a notebook in the vest pocket. Some wise man has said that all education after we are twenty-five years old consists in knowing where to look for things.

Another help that school education gives to an official is to broaden him so that he can use different methods on different properties. There are three main reasons why officials without much early education have succeeded and will continue to succeed. The first is native ability, which remains comparatively undeveloped without the second, which is opportunity. The third is the good luck to work under organizers and developers of talent. Training under the right sort of leaders is an education in itself. The danger of relying on such training alone is that one may copy too blindly the methods of his master without being broad enough to realize that the same master under other conditions of territory would adopt radically different methods. This is the reason why there are so many failures when a new man takes a crowd of his followers to reorganize a property. If all succeed, very well, but if one fails the most of the bunch go tumbling down like a row of blocks.

Again, the educated man from his knowledge of history is less likely to forget that what may go in fifteen-year-old Oklahoma will receive the icy mitt and the marble heart in three-hundred-year-old Virginia. Triples that are O.K. in cavalier South Carolina may be too quick acting in puritan Massachusetts. Commercialism, like patriotism, rests on certain fundamental principles. The application of these principles may be as uniform as a train of system cars; it may be as diverse as the cars in a train of a connecting line. Orthodoxy is usually my doxy.

The rough and ready efficiency of the West, which has developed a vast domain, has won the praise of the world. Our rough and ready brethren are finding that, as society rapidly becomes more highly organized, this old-time efficiency must be supplemented with technical education. So you find your self-made magnate giving his sons college educations. The only regrettable part is that to make it easy the old man raises the low joints for the boys and they do not always get bumpings enough to test their equipment thoroughly. Time will correct this, and more college men, more presidents' sons, will fire, will switch, will brake, will become men behind cars as well as men behind desks. It is not only what you know, but what you make people believe you know, that counts in this little game of life. The American people never go back on a man who puts aside birth or education and stakes his all upon his manhood; who is willing to share the dangers and the hardships of his calling. Our military men have long since learned this lesson, and the son of the general must do the same guard duty, make the same marches, dig the same trenches, and face the same bullets as his fellows. His father knows that for it to be otherwise would be to handicap the son by the contempt of his comrades. Like the Spartan mother, he says: "My son, return with your shield or upon it."

Did you ever consider how uncertain a quantity is opportunity, as inscrutable as the ways of Providence? In all ages and in all callings it has been one of the numerous mysteries that make life so attractive. There is many a veteran conductor, many a gray-haired station agent, who, if he could have had the chance to start, would have become a general manager. Some men have to go to another road to be fully appreciated. When a man is young he is criticized if he changes roads. When he is older his services are sought because of his varied experience with different roads. Human nature is prone to limit the length of everybody's train to the capacity of its own sidetracks.

In the spring of 1861 there went from his tannery at Galena to the capital