Page:Hine (1912) Letters from an old railway official.djvu/149

 the stage of having both a teller and a bookkeeper, the one is a check on the other, because of a difference in point of view. I do not understand that a bank considers its bookkeepers more honest than its tellers or vice versa. The bookkeeper came along to check the teller, not because of such marked variations in humanity, but because of the volume of business. There was more than one man could do.

The large corporations, including the railways, seem to have followed governments into a fundamental fallacy in the matter of money and accounting. Because, now and then, in spite of safeguards, a trust is violated and money embezzled, a remedy is sought by segregating in administration all activities having to do directly with fiscal affairs. The ultimate effect is dwarfing to administration and fatal to maximum composite efficiency. In a compact establishment like a department store or a large manufacturing plant, the closer contact of the departments concerned minimizes the evils of this segregation. The operations of a government or of a railway extend over so much territory that such close contact is impossible. The result is that our bookkeeper