Page:Hine (1912) Letters from an old railway official.djvu/190

 proper and legitimate discrimination in the performance of his important function.

At first blush, in these days of doubting insinuation and hysterical aspersion, when a railway official is often denied the presumption of possessing common honesty, when the burden of proof is to show him as having average rectitude, such a statement may be construed by distorted minds as a plea for subtle forms of rebating. Tenuous as may seem the line here between right and wrong, it can in a given case be readily determined. Too often apparent complexities are only the result of an abstruse contemplation of abstract possibilities. Give honest, fearless, practical treatment to each concrete case as it arises, indulge more in inductive reasoning which predicates laws upon facts, not facts upon laws, and complexity gives way to common sense. Transportation is the most exacting, the most diversified, the most far-reaching of commercial and industrial activities. It follows then, under the law of the survival of the fittest, that those who can survive in the art and science of transportation must be the fittest of the fit. In their hands can safely be left the solution of these difficult problems.