Page:Hine (1912) Letters from an old railway official.djvu/121

 few who prove hopelessly deficient. The track laborer who can qualify to look after a particular signal is worth a few cents more a day to the company and should be so advised. If you start with the presumption that the man below is too dumb to learn you handicap him and probably doom him to failure. If you make him believe that he can learn what men of the same class around him are learning, that you, his elder brother, are in duty bound to help him, you will be astonished at the response of his latent intelligence. The great managers of the feudal period were forceful drivers. The great managers of to-day and to-morrow are great teachers, the greatest of all experts, because they show the man below how to do it. Lots of men know how. A good many know why. Comparatively few have that rare and valuable combination of knowing both how and why. It is not a happen so, but a response to the law of supply and demand, that men of the Woodrow Wilson type are coming to the front in our political life.

Getting back to signals. On a road of more than one or two tracks, it may be advisable to segregate your signals from your track. Here again the dividing line is volume of business