Page:Forty years of it (IA fortyyearsofit00whitiala).pdf/359

 *ten an excellent work on the whole subject, had advised us indeed that a disproportionate amount of energy and effort had already been expended—not by us, only, but by all those in other cities who were in similar struggles—in the direction of low fares. He pointed out, I remember, that five cents in that day was worth little more than three cents or three and a half cents had been a decade before, according to the scale of prices then current; he thought that in terms of general prices the public had already secured three-cent fares without knowing it. It was a question of some subtlety and some intricacy, to be left to economists; we could not feel that our battle had been won so easily, and we did not undertake to console the people with the recondite theory. We had before us, in vision, and sometimes in their corporeal reality, the weary and exasperated strap-hangers, and the human sardines on the rear platform with their valid complaints; they all wanted low fares, good service, and seats. An old street car man once said that to provide seats for everybody is an impossibility, and to prove this assertion he humorously classified humanity into three groups: "workers, clerkers and shirkers." Each morning, he said, the workers go down at seven, the clerkers at eight, and the shirkers at nine, and that therefore it is easy to provide them all with seats in the morning hours; but that as all three classes wish to go home at the same hour in the evening, it is then physically impossible to provide them all with seats.

But whether or not too great stress was