The expert traffic executives of this super-railroad would settle these rate questions, and be subject only to revisions, in the strict legal points involved, by the Interstate Commerce Commission, which then would become almost exclusively a high court of railroad law, in turn subject only to revision in its decisions by the United States Supreme Court itself. The traffic experts of the United States Railroad would control absolutely the routings of through business where it passed over the lines of two or more of the regional carriers. But as an immediate beginning the best construction step that they possibly could make would be the creation of a real scientific freight-rate structure for this country. Up to the present time this has been deemed an impossibility, by traffic experts outside of the ranks of the railroads as well as those within them. But it has only been an impossibility because of the lack of proper central organization or authority among our railroads as they exist to-day. Such a plan in the main--called the block-and-zone system--has now been in successful operation for a number of years in both our parcel-post and express services. I was in the express business myself when it first came into being there. Up to the very hour of its arrival the tariff-sheets of the express companies were veritable Chinese puzzles; they were nearly as complicated and as obsolete as the freight tariff-sheets of our American railroads of to-day. The extremely gifted and far-seeing mind of the late Franklin K. Lane devised the block-and-zone tariff system for the express. Some of the older men of the express companies then felt that the blackest day in their history had come to hand. Within a twelvemonth the most reactionary of these had been converted to the new scheme. They saw its simplicity, its fairness, its utility, its economy. What was done for the express nearly half a dozen years ago should be done for the railroad freight situation here immediately. At the time of his retirement from office Director-General McAdoo already had begun to plan a national freight-rate structure. He had engaged to perfect its details Edward Chambers, vice-president of the Santa Fe, and one of the ablest traffic men that this country has ever known. The Chambers plan was worked out quite fully but was never made public. It is known, however, that it follows very closely the general scheme of both the parcel-post and the express block-and-zone tariffs varying from them only in its intricacies of detail due to the vast range of commodities that a railroad finds itself obliged to carry upon its cars.