Everything. Sentiment. Tradition. Morale. Progress. Dollars and cents, if you will force me to be materialistic.
But the far greater thing to be gained is the intimacy of contact resulting by the location of a railroad president with large authority within but a few hours reach of the people that he is endeavoring to serve. Why should the man of Concord, New Hampshire, or he of Lewiston, Maine, have to go farther than Boston for the adjudication of even his most serious differences with the railroad? Or he of Madison or Racine further than Chicago? And when it comes to the contacts with his fellow-workers, how can a railroad president in our Federal capital city of Washington be expected to know of living conditions in Great Falls, Montana, or in Wichita Falls, Texas? Incidentally that is the chief issue upon which the Pennsylvania is to-day fighting the Railroad Labor Board in the courts. It wishes the right to meet its own workers, in its own way. This is real regional thought. The people in control of the Standard Oil and the Bell Telephone companies came long ago to bless the day when legislation embarrassing to them at the time, forced the regional system upon them. They now know its real advantages. The intimacy of labor control alone is worth all the trouble and all the expense.
There is little or no dispute among those who really know the situation that nine tenths of the solution of the railroad labor problem as it exists in this country to-day rests in better contacts between the employers and the employed. A predicament such as we saw but a little time ago—the general manager of a great railroad unable to get his proposals to his shop-workers—would hardly be possible in a road whose limits were not too great. A certain high executive of my acquaintance is going to take extreme exception to my suggestion that the regional trunk-lines in the immediate district between New York and Chicago be broken at Buffalo, at Pittsburg, and the Ohio River.
“I can sit in my office,” he says, “and each morning within an hour talk with each of my subordinate executives—in Pittsburg, in Cleveland, in Detroit, in Chicago, in St. Louis, in Cincinnati.”
Yet that is just the trouble. Too many railroads in this country have been operated on the long-distance telephone principle. Ten minutes’ talk over a copper wire is hardly equivalent to a day of personal contact, once every ten or twelve or fourteen days. That the men who are at the very tops of our largest railroads have done wonders with the long-distance telephone I shall not deny. But I do not think that they have accomplished intensive railroad direction with it, or anything like intensive railroad direction. And I have not noticed them accomplishing any remarkable results in bettering their relationships with their workers, or with raising the morale of their roads.
Yet just as regional operation and a pretty well divided regional operation, is essential to the best operating results in our American railroads, so on the other hand is centralization fairly vital to any large traffic or financial results.
It will be argued always against any plan for the centralization of our railroads that it makes an easy first step toward government ownership. Such argument is foolish. Yet if it might be good business for the Federal Government in some distant day to take such a step, why is it not good business to undertake it to-day? Particularly when it is in a position to command valuable governmental assistance in the taking of the step. Here is the real nub of this question.
For few practical railroaders will deny certain vast advantages to be gained by the complete centralization of our rail properties—not only in financing and in rate-making, but also in traffic solicitation and control, in expert staff study of mechanical and operating problems, and in the production of proper personnel, particularly for the filling of future executive positions. All of these functions and more too, the United States Railroad could and would undertake. In contentions which might arise from time to time between the regional roads, its word of decision would be absolute, its authority supreme. And nowhere is this more necessary to-day than in the vexed question of rates—particularly of freight-rates.