Our regional railroads, recentralized and each provided with a president and other directing and operating officers extremely local and sensitive to the territory which they would serve, would have left something behind them in the central organization which was created primarily for the business of rearrangement. For having transacted that immediate business the United States Railroad still would continue to exist as a permanent body, with its headquarters either in New York or in Washington. Its modus operandi would be the virtually continuous sessions of vice-presidents designated from its constituent railroads--one vice-president for each road, especially chosen for this purpose--together with the occasional meetings of the presidents and other executive officers. These men would form a congress whose powers along almost all phases of our national railroad would be virtually supreme. Its greatest power--its greatest responsibility, if you please--would be the proper financing of our railroad structure. That problem is far too big to-day to be handled locally, even in the locality which we know as Wall Street, New York. And Wall Street has shown itself capable of taking care of some pretty large financing problems. Before we are done with our railroad financing, it may be necessary for no less a hand than Uncle Sam's to take hold of it, either by assuming the bonded indebtedness of the roads and against this issuing his own bonds at a slightly higher rate of interest, or else by direct and complete ownership of the carriers. I am not going into this vexing and highly controversial phase of the railroad question in America further than to say that I do not feel that this country is ready yet to accept government ownership and operation--particularly the latter. Please note that I have differentiated between these two. It is not often done. And yet in that very shading of difference may yet rest the solution of our entire railroad problem. At the conclusion of this book I shall refer to this again. According to a man who has made a critical inspection of the outstanding securities of our American railroads and of whose ability and impartiality there can be no doubt whatsoever, these are represented chiefly in about ten billion dollars' worth of perfectly good bonds and about five billion dollars' worth of good stock, at least normally returning dividends. About $100,000,000 might be written off in poor bonds, that either are fraudulent or else never should have been issued, while there are four or five billion dollars par value of stock certificates which to-day may be regarded as fairly hopeless. Out of all these securities three quarters would assay, which after all does not compare so badly with the estimate of value of from $18,000,000,000 to $20,000,000,000 which the railroads themselves place upon their properties.