Page:Hine (1904) Letters from an old railway official.djvu/109

 June 26, 1904.

My Dear Boy:—We were speaking of railroad civil service, so called. As I told you before, our civil service is so far from the genuine article that I always feel like qualifying the term in some way for fear of being called in on the carpet for failure to cut the proper duplex. It is a great big subject, worthy of the most serious consideration, because it concerns men, not machines. Furthermore, it is a high type of man with whom we deal or should deal. We are all so busy that we say we concern ourselves with results. We all butt in too much on details, usually along the line of our early training. Yet, withal, we overlook some pretty long shots because we flatter ourselves we are too busy to place small bets.

Even after we have wasted so much of the building season that we give the contractor a bonus to rush the new line to completion in