Page:Hine (1912) Letters from an old railway official.djvu/80

 another judge has done, the former does not write the latter a letter to inquire, but sends to the clerk’s office and gets the complete record up to date.

Are the railroads above copying sound working principles of efficiency from such tried institutions as the Army, the Navy, the civil courts and the churches? Certainly not, as some roads are showing in a highly practical way. Such movements as these are but expressions of a cosmic tendency, greater and more powerful than any one branch of human activity. Such trends of progress are noted by observers who happen to be favored with a view from the watch towers and who are able to make suitable adaptations because they realize that ideas are greater than men, that practical devices are greater than their inventors.

Sound ideas often depend for their development and permanency as working practices upon some great exponent of acknowledged capacity for leadership. In 1870 Bismarck had baited on the French and von Moltke had planned their discomfiture. In 1870 General Robert E. Lee, entering upon the last year of his life, was president of Washington and Lee University at Lexington, Virginia, where