Before the recent change there were a number of localities where standards of time were exclusively employed which varied as much as thirty minutes, both on the east and the west, from mean local time, without appreciable inconvenience to those using them. From this fact the conclusion was inevitable that within those limits a single standard might be employed. The result has proved this conclusion to have been well founded. No public reform can be accomplished unless the evil to be remedied can be made plainly apparent. That an improvement will be effected must be clearly demonstrated, or the new status of affairs which will exist after the change, must be shown to have been already successfully tried. Here, as in law, custom and precedent are all powerful. It would be a difficult task to secure the general adoption of any system of time-reckoning which cannot be employed by all classes of the community. Business men would refuse to regard as a reform any proposition which introduced diversity where uniformity now exists, nor would railway managers consent to adopt for their own use a standard of time not coinciding with or bearing a ready relation to the standard employed in other business circles. To adopt the time of a universal day for all transportation purposes throughout the world, and to use it collaterally with local time, would simply restore, and possibly still more complicate, the very condition of things in this country which the movement of last year was intended to and did to a great extent obviate. Railway managers desire that the time used in their service shall be either precisely the same as that used by the public, or shall differ from it at as few points as possible, and then by the most readily calculated differences. The public, on the other hand, have little use for absolutely accurate time, except in connection with matters of transportation, but will refuse to adopt a standard which would materially alter their accustomed habits of thought and of language in every-day life. That this position is absurd may be argued, and, perhaps, admitted, but it is a fact, and one which cannot be disregarded. The adoption of the universal day or any system of time-reckoning based upon infrequent--such as the great quadrant--meridians, to be used by transportation lines collaterally with local time, is, therefore, practically impossible.