Because the brief history of the Railroad Administration enters so very vitally into any consideration of the railroad situation in the United States both to-day and to-morrow, I shall come to it for the next chapter of this book. For the final paragraphs of this, consider once again the present lowered efficiency of our rail transport in this country. That it has been bettered in some of its phases since its relinquishment by the government I shall not deny; that it has been bettered in some of the most vital of them I shall dispute until the end. The proofs are too easily at hand. And so the reading of them may lead us into a really intelligent understanding of the situation. * * * * * What's the matter with our railroads? That question is being asked hundreds of times each day by business men all the way across the land--from Portland, Maine, to Portland, Oregon, from north to south and back again. These men, keen in their perception of many of the great and perplexing problems assailing the United States at this moment, frankly admit their lack of an understanding of the railroad one. They are torn by a vast conflict of statements and of opinions. Skilled propagandists succeed only in adding to the confusion. Apparently nowhere is an independent voice raised in the interest of the common citizen of America, the man who perhaps is not a wholesale user of our overland transport but who realizes from personal contact each time he makes a shipment of his goods or goes himself abroad into the land that our national railroad has suffered a vast deterioration within the last decade, that it no longer functions with anything like the high efficiency that it had attained say twelve or fifteen years ago. What's the matter with our railroads? It is a fair question, and one that demands a fair answer. Why should not our railroad structure in the United States to-day be rendering service at least as good as that which it rendered but ten or twelve years ago? Is it man failure, either in the lists of the rank and file or in those of the executives? Is it, as has been charged frequently, interference by the Federal and State governments or, to put it in a gentler fashion, over-regulation by these same agencies? Is there lack of intelligence or vision or human understanding? If so, just where are these lacks? It is to the answering of these questions that the writer puts his sixteen years of intimate and personal study of the American railroad and, as he has just promised, takes up that problem on April 5, 1917, the day that the United States of America officially entered the World War overseas. CHAPTER II THE UNITED STATES RAILROAD ADMINISTRATION