If this feeling comes to the patrons of these railroads how much more distinctly must it come to their workers? In subsequent chapters in a pleading for a division of our national railroad structure into shorter operating units, despite the ponderous suggestions of the Transportation Act, I am going to refer to the fact that in this country a half-dozen or so of the small railroads ("small" at least in a comparative sense) are the best operated and hence the most profitable lines in the land. And incidentally, despite the great tangle of red tape that the government system of railroad control has spun about them, they still enjoy comparatively friendly relations with their labor. With the fundamental idea of railroad consolidation one can have no quarrel whatsoever. It was inevitable. It came logically and sequentially--in some ways before many folk were really aware of it. When a very few years after the close of the Civil War the merger of the Grand Trunk railroad was accomplished--a single system of nearly four thousand miles, stretching all the way from Portland, Maine, by way of Montreal and Toronto to Detroit (a little later, on to Chicago)--America stood aghast. And yet what were four thousand miles to be compared with a single system of twelve thousand miles of main-line track--nearly one-twentieth of the total mileage in the United States, upon which moves one-seventh of the traffic of the nation? And yet here is but one of three or four big twelve-thousand-mile systems that our land holds. In our Yankee version of the English language we dearly love that word "big." Yet is it not now a fair time to ask what that bigness has really cost us? Granted that with a certain amount of real aid from the state it has given us through rail and through car routes of an amazing multiplicity--even though one cannot cross the United States from the Atlantic to the Pacific in a through car, unless it be a freight-car--that it has simplified vastly our tariffs, our ticketing and our way-bill systems, it certainly is failing to-day in many, many instances to give us the high degree of service which our railroads themselves have educated us to expect. As I said at the beginning our transport service to-day is appreciably poorer and the rates a great deal higher than they were a decade ago, while the personnel problem of our railroads, in their executive ranks as well as in the ranks of the great mass of their labor, has become a matter of real alarm.