My reason for going into this, I fear, somewhat tedious narration is that British distrust of American commercial honesty was originally created, perhaps, more than by anything else, by the scandals which were notoriously associated with the early history of railways in the United States. It is not desired here either to insist on the occurrence of those scandals or to palliate them. The point is that the conditions which made those scandals possible (of which the incapacity on the part of the North-western lines to keep faith with each other may be regarded as symptomatic) were concomitants of a particular stage only in the development of the country. Competition must always exist in any business community; but in the desperate form of a breathless, day-to-day struggle for bare existence it need only exist among railway companies where lines have been built in excess of the needs of the population. With the increase in population and the growth of trade the asperity of the conditions necessarily becomes mitigated, until at last, when the traffic has assumed proportions which will afford all competitors alike a reasonable profit on their shares, the management ceases to be exposed to any more temptation than besets the Boards of the great British companies. Not a few railway companies in the United States have arrived at that delectable condition—are indeed now more happily circumstanced than any English company—and among them are some the names of which, not many years ago, were mere synonyms for dishonesty. In the North-western territory of which I have spoken the fact that the current values of all railway shares had on the average increased (until the occurrence of the financial crisis of the close of 1907) by about three hundred per cent. in the last ten years is eloquent.
In the old days the wrong-doing which was rampant, through excess of opportunity and more than abundant temptation, in the higher circles, ran also through all grades of the service; and there was one case at least of a railway company which used in fact to have to discharge all its servants of a certain class at intervals of once a month or thereabouts. The Northern Pacific Railway line was opened across the continent in 1883, and during the next twelve months it was my fortune to have to travel over the western portion of the road somewhat frequently. The company had a regularly established tariff of charges, and tickets from any one station to another could be bought at the booking offices just as on any other railway line in America or England. But few people bought tickets. The line was divided, of course, into divisions, of so many hundreds of miles each, the train being in charge of one conductor (or guard) to the end of his division, where he turned it over to his successor for the next division. It was the business of the conductor to take up the tickets, or collect the fares, while the train was running, and it was well understood among regular passengers on the line that each conductor expected to receive one dollar to the end of his division, no matter at what point a passenger entered the train. The conductor merely walked through the cars collecting silver dollars, of which he subsequently apportioned to the treasury of the company as many as he saw fit. They were probably not many.
On one occasion I stood at a booking-office and, speaking through the small window, asked the clerk for a ticket to a certain place. The conductor of the train, already waiting in the station, had strolled into the office and heard my request.
"Don't you buy a ticket!" said he to me. "I can let you travel cheaper than he can, can't I, Bill?"—this last being addressed to the clerk behind the window; and Bill looked out through the hole and said he guessed that was so.
The company, as I have said, used to discharge its conductors with regularity, or they resigned, at intervals depending on the periods at which accounts were made up, but it was said in those days that there was not a town between the Mississippi and the Pacific Coast which did not contain a drinking saloon owned by an ex-Northern Pacific conductor, and established out of the profits that he had made during his brief term of service.
In the American railway carriages, the method of communication between passengers and the engine, in case of emergency, is by what is known as the "bell-cord" which runs from end to end of the train, suspended from the middle of the ceiling of each car in a series of swinging rings. The cord sways loosely in the air to each motion of the train like a slackened clothes-line in a gale. On the Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fé Railway the story used to be told that at the end of the day the conductors would toss each coin received into the air to see if it would balance on the bell-cord. The coins which balanced went to the company; those which did not, the conductor took as his own.
That, be it noted, was the state of affairs some twenty-four years ago. I question if there is much more peculation on the part of the employees of the Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fé to-day than there is on the part of the servants of the Great Western of England or any other British company.
The place where the conductor advised me not to buy a ticket had then a few yards of planking laid on the prairie for a platform and a small shed as a station building. The town consisted of three or four brick buildings and a huddle of wooden shanties. To-day it is one of the twenty most populous cities in the United States with tall office buildings, broad busy streets, and sumptuous private residences. I used to have excellent trout-fishing in what is now the centre of a great town. Where the air to-day is filled with the hum of wheels and the roar of machinery, then was only open prairie innocent of any evidence of human occupation beyond some three or four things like dog-kennels badly built of loose lattice-work on the river's bank. These were the red Indians' Turkish baths.
The old code of morality has vanished with the red Indian and the trout-fishing. In the early days of that town there used to be nobody to maintain public order but an efficient Vigilance Committee, which executed justice by the simple process of hanging persons whom the public disliked, and which was still in nominal existence when I was there. Now the city has the proper complement of courts, from the United States Court downwards, and a bar which has already furnished one or two members to the United States Senate. Of course this has happened in the very far West but the change which has come over New York in the same length of time is no less astonishing if less picturesque. It is as unjust to compare the morals or manners of the American people of to-day with those of even three decades ago as it would be to compare the state of twentieth-century society in New Zealand with the old convict days. In one generation Japan has stepped from the days of feudalism to the twentieth century. America, in all that goes to constitute civilisation, has in the last twenty-five years jumped, according to European canons, at least a hundred.
