What was to replace it? Government ownership? Some of the people who in 1916 had a stray thought or two that the state ownership and operation of our railroads might not be such a bad thing after all, by the end of 1920 were pretty well disillusioned. At the beginning of this book I reviewed in some slight detail the achievements and the failures of the United States Railroad Administration. It proved that in the centralization of an entire railroad structure of this land certain great operating economies might be accomplished; it also proved quite as definitely the fact that our 265,000 miles of railroad consolidated into a single structure was far too clumsy and too unwieldy for any sort of efficient operation whatsoever. A paradoxical statement in sound, but one in fact quite accurate. Three years ago I attempted the fabrication of alternative railroad centralization and decentralization schemes. In the one I bowed abjectly to our great American god of competition. To the limit of my ability and knowledge I recognized banking control, natural traffic routes and breaking points, and interlocking directorates and ownerships. On paper I laid down a number of "competitively consolidated" railroads--not more than twenty, or at the most twenty-five,--for the entire United States. I linked widely separated roads because they already had linked themselves by joint ownership; I split New England in twain, giving the New Haven to the Pennsylvania and the rest of her railroads to the already overburdened and somewhat unwieldy New York Central. Such moves followed the logic of Wall Street. The comfort and convenience of Boston mattered not at all. Did she not have competition? What mattered it that under such a plan the Baltimore and Ohio, the Erie, the Lackawanna, the Lehigh Valley, or the Canadian roads would have no entrance either to her or to the fine industrial territory about her, save over the rails of competitors? That was a mere detail! And while Boston might have the competition of two roads, little of the rest of New England would. As I have already said in this book, railroad competition may be the industrial necessity, nay even the very breath of commercial life, to such fine manufacturing towns as Rochester or Akron or Dayton or Grand Rapids, but how about such fine manufacturing towns as Bridgeport, New Haven, Hartford, and Providence? Are they not also entitled to the breath of commercial life? Yet to give these four big typical New England towns railroad competition would mean the complete dismemberment of the compact New Haven system--an almost utter impossibility. Southern New England is already pretty tightly set as a simon-pure railroad region. It can be regarded as nothing else.