Page:Hine (1912) Letters from an old railway official.djvu/197

 is another instance where L. C. L. judgment is worth a whole trainload of rigid bumping posts.

Among the many advantages of the chief of staff should be his ability to prepare explanations for higher authority from routine reports at hand without making a special reference of papers to offices below.

Your old dad takes considerable pride in the fact that he never consciously wrote a sharp letter to a subordinate. Once, when a trainmaster, and sick in bed, he dictated in a letter to a conductor, “Hereafter, please take sufficient interest to see that switches are properly locked.” The stenographer improved the phraseology by writing, “Please take special interest, etc.”—see the difference?—which happy circumstances caused the conductor to come to the sickroom and express his undying devotion to the cause of locked switches. A personal interview with a conductor, however, is worth a dozen letters by a trainmaster.

These same observations apply to the general manager as well as to the trainmaster. The higher one goes, the more consideration must he cultivate. If you have something