Page:Fagan (1908) Confessions of a railroad signalman.djvu/98

80 more interest in such matters than this man had any idea of.

Some time ago a vice-president of one of our railroad systems addressed a gathering of some five hundred railroad station-agents and clerks. He had a good deal to say to the men about loyalty. He tried to impress upon his hearers that railroad men should trunk less about their wages and their material prosperity and more about character and the duties they owed to their employers and to the public. The prosperity of the men was in every way dependent upon the prosperity of the road; consequently, every act of loyalty, every little economy, was a genuine factor in obtaining satisfactory results and returns for the road. In the matter of supplies, for example, employees could do splendid work for the road if they would only put their minds to it. But it was not such an easy matter nowadays to put a stop to waste in some departments, even when its practice was shameful and persistent. Of course, it was an easy matter to find fault with a station-agent if he used a pint of ink over and above his allowance; but when the operating department consumed thousands of gallons of oil per year more than was absolutely necessary, the problem became much more complicated. However, seeing that reporters were excluded from the hall, he would venture to say that in the single case of oil it was possible for