This entire question of the probable ownership of the regional roads I have left until the succeeding and final chapter of this book. I do not agree in the opinion of many bankers that the regionalization of the roads should be attempted in a supine bowing to their financial results of recent years, and so should be based upon these showings. I believe that it should be based fundamentally upon the service needs of the communities that the regional roads of to-morrow will have to serve. The Southern Tier of the state of New York for too many years suffered set-backs from the fact that virtually its sole railroad servant was a historic line, which wholesale fraud had doomed to a lifetime of perpetual near-paralysis. * * * * * So much for New England. Such planning is typical of that which might be expected of any non-competitive regional plan. Along the entire outer or coastline rim of the United States the regional plan without compromise or variation works out pretty well indeed, all the way from the proposed Northern New England Lines that you have just seen out to the Californian railroad, or the Puget Sound Lines, which would immediately adjoin the Californian upon the north. Along the outer edges of the country it would be easy to devise. It is a pretty plan, and in its simplicity most beguiling. And yet when one comes to the center of the country this same simple non-competitive regional plan becomes almost utterly impossible. After all we are working with things as they are and not merely with things as we should like to have them. A careful study of the rival plans--non-competitive regional and highly competitive regional--has led me to a firm belief that the real solution of our problem of railroad organization in this country lies in a compromise between them. Were we to start afresh to plan the railroads of the United States, supposing that not a mile of track had been laid down between the Atlantic ocean and the Pacific and that our vision was sufficiently Aladdin-like to foresee the present growth of the land (really built up upon that very railroad development), we might well have adopted a purely regional plan, as did the French so long ago. But much as we may admire such a theory we cannot entirely ignore hard facts--the important properties already built and well developed, the recognized making and breaking points of traffic, the individual morale and tradition of the several roads--the sort of thing that we have shown, despite all of its recent labor troubles, still so existent upon the Pennsylvania and some other roads.