Letters from an Old Railway Official. Second Series: [To] His Son, a General Manager

by Charles De Lano Hine

Affectionately, your own,

D. A. D.

LETTER XI.
THE PROBLEM OF THE GET-RICH-QUICK CONDUCTOR.

Chicago, June 17, 1911.

My Dear Boy:—Not so very long ago the wife of a passenger conductor, running out of a large southern city, sought the assistance of her pastor, a noted divine. She was worried by the fact that her husband was stealing the company's money. With a good woman's intuition she knew that the wages of sin is death; that sooner or later her husband would lose his job and his family its legitimate income. To her good, old-fashioned, unspecialized conscience stealing is stealing, whether called "embezzlement," "holding out," or "trouble with the auditor." The fearless evangelist shortly afterward preached a powerful sermon against stealing, and included passenger conductors in his warnings. So incensed was the conductor in question that he announced his intention of disregarding the protection carried by the clerical cloth and of knocking the minister down. When the two met his bluff was called. The conductor, not the minister, came to his knees, not in fighting, but in prayer.

Here, my boy, is a canker sore that must be cured. Do not tell me that the Order of Railway Conductors is alone to blame. Do not tell me that in the lodge room the order side-tracks the eighth commandment for the working schedule. Do not tell me that the order will expel a member for any other offense rather than for stealing. Do not tell me that our problem is harder and our revenue less because Ed. Clark, the grand chief of an order thus lawless, was appointed by Teddy Roosevelt to sit in judgment on us from the high throne of the Interstate Commerce Commission. Tell me, rather, that we, the official class, are to blame; that we must cease to dodge responsibility. We, the educated and entrepreneur class; we, the elder brothers of society and industry, cannot shift the burden.

Please do not misunderstand me. There are many honest passenger conductors. I have known them on the road and in their homes. Some there are who deserve the more credit for withstanding temptation because of sickness or extravagance in the family. There are, however, too many dishonest passenger conductors. It is not enough for a man to be honest himself. The complexities of modern life make him more than ever his brother's keeper. He must not only stand for the right but condemn the wrong. The Order of Railway Conductors must make the American people believe that it is a great moral force for honesty in all things. We, the officials, must help the conductors to bring about this happy result.

The clerk for the corner grocer will not steal from his employer as quickly as he will from a large corporation. The existence of a personal employer brings home the moral turpitude by visualizing the individual wrong committed. Coupled with this higher moral incentive is the fear of detection through close personal supervision and interest. In a large corporation we have to approximate to this condition. The corporation, an impersonal creation, is vitalized by the men charged with responsibilities. The problem of organization is to give maximum effectiveness to this vitalization, to utilize to the fullest degree the personal equations of those entrusted with authority. Many railroads have lost control of their passenger conductors because of a fundamental misconception of the principles of true organization.

On the early railways the superintendent was the only officer the conductor officially knew. The superintendent, close to the president, was interested in the revenue as well as the disbursement side of the company's ledger. If the conductor stole, if the returns were short on a day of heavy travel, the superintendent was among the first to know it, and to preserve his own reputation, and thereby hold his own job, promptly discharged the conductor. By and by some conductors graduated into superintendents. This new condition brought a new temptation. The conductor, if allowed to keep on stealing, and if favored with a run where the stealing was especially good, could well afford to whack up secretly with the superintendent. A few, a very few, superintendents yielded to this temptation. Along came the auditor with his mistaken theory that human nature can be changed and men made more honest by being put in "my department." He said, in effect, "Take this away from the superintendent, who is dishonest and busy with other things; let this mysterious specialty of conductors' collections be handled by the only honest department." So the superintendent was relieved from responsibility for making his conductors render honest returns. He soon lost interest in that feature. The roads grew, and superimposed above the superintendent came first the general superintendent, and then the general manager, both also relieved from this responsibility to which the auditor clung with jealous tenacity. The conductor probably could not have told what principles of organization had been violated. He was the first to see the easier mark the company had become, the first to profit by the serious mistake that had been made. He found that his reports were checked by office clerks hundreds of miles away and entirely uninformed as to current conditions of local travel. The superintendent and the other division officials who rode with him and knew conditions were powerless to check him promptly and effectively because his reports and returns were going to somebody else over the hills and far away. These officials, because somebody else was responsible, did not seem to care very much. So the conductor stole under their very eyes and got away with it. Anything like this which begets a wholesale contempt for duly constituted authority is demoralizing to general discipline. The labor unions are not alone to blame for the spread of insubordination.

All men are students of practical psychology, whether conscious of the fact or not. The conductor found that to hold his job he must do well those things for which the superintendent and the division officials were responsible. So the bigger thief the conductor became the more careful was he about other duties. He was a crank on train rules, perhaps, or made courtesy to the public his watchword. All of this stood him well in hand. Sooner or later the spotter caught him and the auditor requested the general manager to order his discharge. When this got down to the superintendent or the trainmaster the conductor was called in. Instead of being berated for a thief, if he acknowledged the corn, the conductor was discharged, half sympathetically, half apologetically. The division official would have resented the imputation of harboring or encouraging a thief. To him the conductor was an efficient, faithful employe, meeting all requirements of service. If the conductor failed to please somebody else it really must be the fault of that somebody or the system. This feeling was not unnatural, since the detection came through a discredited channel, the spotter. Rare are the circumstances where secret service should be necessary. There is something inherently wrong in any system which has to gain routine information by indirect methods. The detective should not be necessary for checking the good and the bad alike, but only for following up those who become manifestly bad or notoriously corrupt. The most efficient system is that where open checking and inspection are so thorough that temptation is diminished by the ever-present thought of prompt and sure detection. This desirable condition cannot obtain where the system makes such important officers as the superintendent and the trainmaster unconscious attorneys for the defense, sometimes openly advocating reinstatement of a thief. On the contrary, from its impersonal nature, a corporation must be so administered as to gain the moral effect of every available force for right, to secure the help, however small, of every person connected with the administration. Views of composite efficiency must converge at a point sufficiently near to be of practical value, not so remote as to be of only theoretical interest. No system is perfect. Under any conditions the very size of a railway necessitates a trifling allowance for peculation which creeps in. This can, however, be reduced to a negligible quantity.