"Fourth, the application of sound economies, including:

  1. The elimination of superfluous expenditures.
  2. The payment of a fair and living wage for services rendered and a just and prompt compensation for injuries received.
  3. The purchase of material and equipment at the lowest prices consistent with a reasonable, but not an excessive, profit to the producer.
  4. The adoption of standardized equipment and the introduction of approved devices that will save life and labor.
  5. The routing of freight and passenger traffic with due regard to the fact that a straight line is the shortest distance between two points.
  6. The intensive employment of all equipment and a careful record and scientific study of the results obtained, with a view to determining the comparative efficiency secured.

"The development of this policy will, of course, require time. The task to which the Railroad Administration has addressed itself is an immense one. It is as yet too early to judge of the results obtained, but I believe that great progress has been made toward the goal of our ideals."

GOVERNMENT CONTROL CRITICISED

The defects of the Government administration of the railways have been the subject of both criticism and apology. A diagnosis published by the Engineering News Record of New York states that the whole difficulty is ascribed to the employment of bankers in high places of railway management. Railroads, it was asserted, cannot be run by men of the banking type of mind. The article continues:

"Here was, and is, an agency with daily influence on the life of every member of the community, performing a service essential to the nation's life. Yet it has few friends among the people at large; more now than formerly, however, due to the number of those whose pity has been excited at the railroads' plight. The first of the railroads' plagues was the type of management—manipulation, it would better be called—which regarded the properties not as carriers but as media for stock-jobbing operations. Consolidations with the addition of water, and reconsolidations, with still more water, were the order of the day; while those operating the properties danced riotously over their territories waving insolently the flag of 'The Public Be Damned.' Rebates, car-withholding tyrannies, all manner of schemes were worked to aid the favored few, while the purchasing methods honeycombed the organization with rottenness.

"Then came the day for the people to have their say, and one national and forty-eight State commissions began to bedevil the carriers. What the stock-jobbers and the grafters had failed to do the people in their vengeance helped to complete. The public at large, which under intelligent management of the properties would have been the railroads' best friend, had been alienated. As a result we have had the drift into bankruptcy which has been railroad history during the past decade. Instances need not be cited. Each one can supply them from his own neighborhood. Probably the mention of the New Haven will furnish sufficient nausea to carry the right impression.

"And that débâcle we attribute to the banking type of mind, that type of mind that places personal profit ahead of all other considerations. The engineering type of mind, we hold, would have analyzed the purpose of the railroads—would have seen that service to the public at large, and not to any private interest, was the prime object, would have erected that as the railroads' ideal and builded a machine for its attainment."

BRITISH RAILWAY MANAGEMENT

Like American railways the railway system of Great Britain was under private control prior to the war, but the experiment of Government direction began to be applied as soon as the war was declared. Government control did not mean Government ownership. The lines remained the property of the companies. They retained the management of their own concerns subject to the instructions of an executive committee appointed by the Government and the whole machinery of administration went on as before. At the beginning the sole purpose was to facilitate the movement of troops, but as the war developed the scope of the railway executive committee became greatly extended. Working in coöperation with the acting chairman were twelve general managers of leading British lines. Under the central body were groups of committees, each made up of railway experts. The War Office and the Director General of Transport were in touch with the Central Committee. A writer in the Railway Age Gazette for December, 1917, explains the arrangements as follows: