But if your railroad should shut down, unless it should happen to be a sort of fifth wheel in an unusually competitive territory, the whole community would suffer tremendously, immediately and permanently, while any perceptible lowering of the quality of its railroad service brings instant trouble and discomfort to it. When, as a war measure, the old-time station-agent, reared in loyalty and tradition to render a real service to his public, became even for a time the government bureaucrat, the traveling public quickly realized the difference. And no other one thing perhaps has done more to render the phrase "government railroad" more obnoxious to the average American to-day than the conduct toward them of many railroad employees during the twenty-six months of Federal control. That the men in control of the Railroad Administration took steps, well-planned but fairly impotent, to bring about better politeness and courtesy among the railroad servants is not to be denied. But the problem was quite beyond them, the distances between the administration offices at Washington and the men themselves much too far to be efficiently traversed. Letters and bulletins urging courtesy were puerile. The railroad rank and file laughed at them. Why courtesy? They were autocrats. Did not the first director-general himself proclaim that in the earliest days of his regency at Pueblo and again at El Paso? After such proclamation these courtesy bulletins were to be regarded as just so much waste paper. Blinks and Jinks both know that in their business courtesy comes through contact. Blinks in his big retail store knows that courtesy is one of the invaluable and irreplaceable assets of his business. So he not only preaches it but inspires it through contact, through knowing his sales-people as well as the rest of his working force personally, and through trying to help them work out the many little problems that perplex their lives. Comparatively few--a mere nothing--of Jinks's employees ever come in personal contact with his customers. Yet he too has found long since that courtesy pays dividends, plain dollars-and-cents dividends. And so he too is preaching it, has well-salaried experts, under the title of social workers, who give their days toward bettering the lot of his factory family, with the courtesy idea well in the forefront of their endeavors. Through personal contact the thing is accomplished, and with it enthusiasm and efficiency--all together the sort of thing that we have learned to call morale.