In the Middle West there is a manufacturing city which in recent years has grown remarkably, both in population and in industry. In ten years the first increased from 35,000 to 99,000 people. It is served by two railroads, one a main line of an important Canadian property and the other the main line of a small and fairly local railroad. The lines of a very large American system are but fourteen miles away, cross level country. The first of the two railroads that actually enter X. is operated from Montreal, when it is not actually operated from London, England. Apparently it has not yet heard of the rapid growth of X., for it has done nothing whatever to increase its facilities to keep pace with that growth; even its officers rarely pay X. the honor of a passing visit. The second of these two roads gets the business. Its headquarters are but sixty miles away. Its president, its general manager, its superintendent, and its traffic manager are vigorous young men who are forever running up to X, and dining or lunching with its Chamber of Commerce and its manufacturers--they call half of them by their first names. They are alert to the necessities of the town and of its people. But they operate a small railroad. They are not burdened with the detail or the worry of five thousand miles of line, or ten thousand or even twelve. It takes super-men to run systems such as these last. And (unfortunately, perhaps) we have not as yet bred super-men in the United States. The road that is but fourteen miles away should have come into X. with its rails a full dozen years ago; it should, that is, if the competitive system is all that its friends proclaim it to be. But it, too, is managed from a city nine hundred miles distant. Its president is as near a super-man as I shall ever hope to know, but nine hundred miles is nine hundred miles, and the line that runs so near to X. is but a minor branch of a vast system that seemingly at least has hundreds that are more important. And so it loses the freight. The mere statement that the large railroad cannot be operated intensively or otherwise successfully without personal contacts will be disputed bitterly. I shall be asked: How about Napoleon? Did he not succeed in inspiring a vast army with a morale that no other army before or since has ever had? Personal contacts were almost out of the question for him. Yet were there not men by the tens of thousands who had not even touched the hem of his garments or laid sight upon his countenance who gladly would have laid down their lives to save his?