maintenance or the chief mechanical official report to the president. The superintendent who finds himself with a complete divisional organization is oblivious to the troubles of a distant yardmaster with car inspectors. When your old Dad was a ninety-dollar yardmaster some of his most important work was at the mercy of a forty-five dollar car inspector. The latter was under a master mechanic a hundred miles or more away, who in turn could usually and properly count on the support of the superintendent of motive power. The obvious inference was to relieve the yardmaster of responsibility for mechanical matters. From one viewpoint these mechanical questions are too highly technical for the yardmaster. From another they are matters of common sense requiring more good judgment than technical training. No, I would not put every yardmaster over the roundhouse foreman and the car inspectors. What I would do would be to make the position of yardmaster sufficiently attractive to impose as a prerequisite for appointment a knowledge of mechanical as well as transportation matters. Gradually I would work away from the switchman or trainman specialist to the all-'round man in whom I could concentrate authority as the head of an important sub-unit of organization. Instead of leveling downward, as the labor unions do, by assuming that the average man can learn only one branch of operation, I would recognize individuality and gradually develop a higher composite type. Because some car inspectors are not fitted to become yardmasters is no good reason for practically excluding all car inspectors from honorable competition for such advancement. When we build a department wall to keep the other fellow out we sometimes find it has kept us in. We blame the labor unions for these narrowing restrictions of employment and advancement. Look once more for the source, and you will find it among our predecessors in the official class, a generation or more ago. These officials insisted upon planes of department cleavage which the men below were quick to recognize. Railway manhood has been more dwarfed by exaggerated official idea of specialization with resulting departmental jealousies than by the labor unions.

Therefore, my boy, let us get some of these inconsistencies out of our own optics before we talk too much about the dust that seems to blind the eyes of those who are exposed to the breezes of that world famous thoroughfare which faces old Trinity Church in New York.

Affectionately, your own,

D. A. D.

  LETTER III.

THE GENERAL MANAGER ON THE WITNESS STAND.

Chicago, April 22, 1911.

My Dear Boy:—Did it ever occur to you how easily a bright lawyer could tangle up many an able railway official on the witness stand? Nowadays we have to spend more or less valuable time testifying about service, rates, capitalization, valuation, practices, methods, and a score of other things that become of public interest. Whether this is just or unjust, necessary or unnecessary, is beside the question. It is a condition, not a theory, that confronts us. The wise railway man, therefore, so orders his official life that it may endure the scrutiny of both the persecutor and the prosecutor, of both the inquisitor and the investigator, of both the muckraker and the political economist. It sometimes happens, since men are only boys grown tall, that public hearings are accompanied by stage settings for dramatic effect; that trifling inconsistencies are magnified into egregious errors. Let me picture part of such a hearing with a general manager on the stand:

Question: You testified, Mr. General Manager, on the direct examination that your road is well managed and has a highly efficient organization, did you not?

Answer: Yes, sir, we think we have one of the best in the country.

Q. Would you mind telling the able members of this Honorable Commission in just what your superiority consists?

A. Not at all, sir. In the first place, we have a great deal of harmony and work very closely together.

Q. Did you ever know a railway official who did not claim the same thing for that part of the organization over which he presided?

A. (Hesitating.) Well, now that you mention it, I can't say that I ever did. (Sudden inspiration.) But you know there is a great deal of bluffing in this world.

Q. (Drily.) What style of anti-bluffing device has your company adopted?

A. Of course, you are speaking figuratively. Such a thing isn't possible. We have a pretty good check in the fine class of men we have developed.

Q. Then, it is a sort of breeding process?

A. Yes, sir, that's it.

Q. To go a little further, has your company any patents on improving human nature?

A. No, sir, we don't claim that.

Q. Is it not a fact that your officials and employes are average citizens recruited and developed about like those of other roads?

A. That is hardly a fair way to put it, but I suppose they are.

Q. Why isn't it fair?

A. Because it leaves out of account the acknowledged efficiency that comes from having men well treated and contented, and better instructed than others. Some farms make more money than others because the old man gets more work out of the boys.

Q. Then your road has officials who can radiate more divine afflatus than others?

A. I didn't say that. We do the best we know how.

Q. What is organization?

A. Why organization is—let me see—why, organization is the name we use for the men—the people, the forces we hire to run our road. It is hard to give a concise definition. I might ask you what law is.

Q. That's easy, law is a rule of conduct. Now, tell me, please, who runs the road?

A. Why, the officers run the road, the men do the work.

Q. Did you not just say that you hire men to run the road?

A. I didn't mean that.

Q. Then in your business you are not very accurate. You say one thing and mean another.

A. No, sir; we may have more sense than you think we have. We spend a lifetime at this business and must learn something about it.

Q. Will you please tell this fair-minded commission just how you run the road, just how you attempt to minister to the needs of the intelligent people of this great commonwealth?

A. Now, sir, it is a pleasure to testify. You are getting away from definitions and technicalities and down to practical facts, where I feel more at home. I will be glad to tell you all about it. In the first place a railway is such a big affair that we divide it into departments.

Q. Excuse me, what is a department?

A. A department is—well—I can make it clearer by describing what it does. As I was saying, we divided it into departments, and a department is—well—a department is—why, something so different from everything else that we put it off by itself and hold the head of the department responsible for results. We are very particular not to interfere with the details of the departments.

Q. Pardon me, but the present members of this exceptionally able commission, inspired further I may say by the example of our patriotic governor, are accustomed to give profound consideration to these great questions. (Modest pricking up of ears of commission, with determined composite expression bespeaking relentless performance of a dangerous duty.) Please, therefore, tell us what your department does.

A. As I testified on the direct examination mine is the operating department; as general manager I have charge of operation.

Q. What does that include?

A. It includes transportation, and maintenance and new construction. It handles the business the other fellow gets.

Q. Who is the other fellow?

A. The traffic department.

Q. Of another company?

A. Why, no, of our own. It is just another department. It deals with the public, it gets the business, it makes the rates; excuse me—it