It has been a number of years now since the last of these excursions was operated. The people who used to ride on them do not go to New York any more, unless perhaps by automobile once in four or five years. Their traffic is lost to the railroad to-day. When they contemplate the regular rates--twelve to fifteen dollars in each direction, in addition to $3.75 for a lower berth each way--and put them alongside of that famous old round-rate trip of but $7, they decide that it is easier to stay at home or wait until Uncle John buys his new flivver and then run down with him. When the Interstate Commerce Commission, yielding to certain influences both within and without it, put up the passenger-rates, it felt gleefully that it had done a very clever thing. Never before had it shown so pathetically its lack of real vision in the railroad question. Freight traffic--not always, but to a large extent--must move, no matter what the rate. But passenger traffic is a temperamental and a whimsical thing--never more so than in this golden age of the automobile. You may lead it to water but you cannot make it drink. You may put up the rates but you cannot make people ride. For a correct answer ask the executives of the New England roads who have been so steadily clamoring for passenger-rate advances. Already I have referred to a 23 per cent. loss in passenger traffic in 1921, as compared with 1920. It is impossible to debit this entirely to prevailing hard times. It comes in large measure from hard feelings. The national feeling of resentment against the present passenger advances recently has found expression in the measure introduced in the United States Senate for the restoration of the mileage-book (also touched upon in an earlier chapter) as a low-priced inducer of travel at wholesale--a measure which at this writing seems certain of passage--with its rate to be fixed at three cents a mile or a trifle less. For once the Interstate Commerce Commission missed its usual astuteness in trying to gage the public demand. Why not sell the mileage-book at a little lower cost than the railroad mile at retail? Can I not buy two dozen pairs of shoes for less than twenty-four times the cost of a single pair? And is it not good business anyway for a railroad to try to get its existing patrons to ride more miles as well as to gain brand-new patrons, along lines which I have already suggested?