A railroad's employees may be outstretched a thousand miles or more. Remember again that the railroad itself is in truth a narrow ribbon, ofttimes no wider than the right-of-way of a single track, far-reaching and tremendously attenuated. A thousand employees here, and then twenty, thirty, forty miles to the next group of more than a dozen! What a small opportunity for any sort of close superintendency or inspection! How hard the problem of attaining a real morale! With the irregular demands of energy that a railroad makes upon a man's time--two trains perhaps within the hour, and then perhaps not another for three or four--it can rarely utilize a man's eight hours at best advantage. While if an employee is at all inclined to idle upon the job how rare the opportunities for loafing--or if not for actual loafing, the failure to work in his allotted hour to the top notch of his ability! These opportunities exist, and unless Mr. Ford's plan should become a howling success, must continue to exist, in a tremendous variety. Our station-agent no longer has to work twelve hours a day. Under government control his hours began to approach those of an easy-going banker. He ceased to worry about the prospective passenger who may be thinking of going to California and who by proper persuasion may be induced to go by the S. A.'s line. All of which is another of the many evidences of the decline of our fine old-time railroad tradition. Not that any fair-minded man would wish a return to the outrageously long hours, low pay, and difficult working conditions of say twenty years ago that it tolerated and condoned. But there ought to have been a happy medium between those conditions and the ones of to-day. It should not have been so very difficult after all to figure out a fair compensation and fair hours and keep a reasonable amount of affection and loyalty in the heart and mind of the employee for the property that he serves. Without these perfectly human qualities working for it within its personnel no railroad, limited as we have just seen by overwhelmingly difficult conditions of superintendency and inspection, can operate at anything like efficiency. It suffers and suffers greatly. And its patrons suffer in consequence. For here again, Blinks and Jinks, does the railroad business differ from yours. If you cannot inspire your workers to affection and loyalty, and through these to efficiency, you fail. Your factory or your store closes. But the community that you served may not suffer greatly--not for any length of time. It readjusts itself; it buys its cotton at another mill, its dress-shirts at the store across the street.