I can have no quarrel with the fine civic spirit that demands that the railroad station of the modern American city shall be the full architectural expression of its progress and its growth--in truth a city gateway. The exquisite monumental concourses of the Pennsylvania Station, the new Grand Central Terminal, and that at Washington have not been lost upon me, while the somber but ecstatic beauty of the interior of the Kansas City Station--to say nothing of the wonderful toys in Fred Harvey's drug-store there--gives me a new thrill each time that I pass through it. But it does seem that we might sometimes use a little more sense and judgment in the planning of these stations. Monuments are quite all right in their way, if they do not cost too much to build and to maintain. Again let me illustrate. When we were considering the electrification of the standard steam railroad in the United States in general, and the Boston suburban zone in particular, I called attention in a brief word to the fact that electrification would vastly increase the passenger capacity of the two great terminals of that city--South Station and North Station. I did not stop then to tell in detail of what it might mean to both of those two civic gateways, already badly crowded in the rush hours of the morning and the evening; of how it might avoid for twenty-five years or more the somewhat imminent present-day necessity of tearing them down and replacing them with far larger stations, at a huge capital expenditure. In South Station the fact that its builders of a quarter of a century ago had the wisdom and the foresight to place underneath the train-shed and head-house loop terminal tracks for future electric operation (tracks and platforms which have never been used and whose very existence is not even suspected by the majority of the people who use the station daily) might defer this necessity. At North Station the time for imperative and radical enlargement is close at hand, unless warded off by an electric installation upon most if not all of the many suburban lines that now enter that busy place. Also in these chapters have I likened New England, in both its topography and its traffic problems, to Old England. Now may I go further and see in Boston fairly accurate replica of London, not alone in appearance--and that it is, with its Christopher Wren churches, its medley of old-time streets, its little parks and squares, and its general appearance of staid sobriety--but in its own local problems of transport. Into London come the tens of thousands each business day by surburban train, both steam and electric. Yet London has no station in size comparing with the North or the South Stations of Boston. Even Liverpool Street and Waterloo, which come the nearest, fall far short in mere physical bulk, though not in train operation. Yet I am thinking of Victoria--that marvel of conciseness and terminal operation.