Page:Fagan (1908) Confessions of a railroad signalman.djvu/95

Rh among yourselves, I am sure you will be able to find the world brighter for you. You seldom, if ever, give any serious thought to bettering your condition except by hoping for better wages. Your ideals begin and end with wages, and so long as that be true there is no possibility of your condition being bettered.”

Surely this is a most uncomfortable and damaging confession. Interpreted in terms of railroad service, it should have the effect of causing the public to sit up and think it all over. With all our education and enlightenment, is it really a fact that the ideals and humanity of the American railroad man can be crammed into a nutshell in this way by honest and practical investigators, and labeled “wages”? At the present day the assertion that corporations are soulless has almost the nature and force of an axiom. It would now appear, according to the authorities just quoted, that the policy and ideals of labor, as represented by the American railroad man, are not only soulless but brainless as well.

So far in this discussion we have been dealing with theories and opinions. It now remains to be seen, by actual example and illustration, upon what ground or basis these theories have been advanced. In plain English, what is the actual and manifest cost, in character and dollars, of this lack of loyalty to the world at large which is a distinguishing fea