Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 30.djvu/600

578 The problem of railway management and operation has grown so intricate; so vast, so complicated and enormous, that it is a maxim that no one man, whatever his habitude, knows "how to run a railroad." The executive officer, the auditor, superintendent or actuary of twenty-five years' service, instead of having kept abreast of his employment, finds that his service has outgrown him, not in fact alone, but in proportion; and that he can deal with remote details only "when concreted by his subordinates into results which in turn are his details. He is himself only the pendulum of the clock-work, the governor of the engine; without his co-operatives and assistants he is powerless, although at the outset of his quarter-century he may have been equal to every item of his department.

Take a single trunk line connecting the city of New York with that Western focus to which, like Rome, all roads lead—Chicago. Every one of its army of eighty thousand employés knows his duty: his duty, often duplicated, perhaps, yet not duplicated, since every item of circumstance must daily and hourly vary it. From the president to the track-walker, no single individual could justify his employment for an instant, did he not, besides his routine, know precisely the single and only proper thing to do to save life and property in any contingency, foreseen or unforeseen; and, moreover, how in the performance not to swerve one atom below or above his exact prerogative. And if—in operation, the reciprocal duties of these eighty thousand must be exactly and incessantly performed in order that every passenger and every pound of freight shall reach its debarkation in safety—what single mind can grasp the relation of numberless such trunk-lines to the great public who trust their lives, persons, and property to them all? Add to this situation that this public, having largely invested their fortunes in these very transporting lines, are dependent for its incomes from their prosperity. Does not the great ramification strike us as one rather too enormous for any single recipe to meet, or to be guided by any one infallible and inexorable rule of constant and rigid procedure?

There is not a single criticism of railway management or outbreak of popular anti-railway feeling which has not its own perfectly well-known periodicity. As a rule, they lapse with time and disappear without exposition. But that all these criticisms and complaints should be carefully clipped, hoarded, pasted together, and sent out as a monograph signed by one name, is an occurrence so exceptional that its occasion might seem to warrant a replication to the array, once for all. Such an occasion seems the appearance of a handsome volume from an eminent press, which not only deals with the entire problem above suggested as a whole (the "Railways and the Republic," by James F. Hudson, New York, 1886), but impresses further as compiled by a gentleman who not only has never been engaged in the management of railways, operatively or financially, but has never