In other words the work of this centralized railroad organization would not only be analagous to the staff of any army but something considerably beyond. Expert railroaders, removed for a season, short or long, from the details and the vexations of everyday problems and working with skilled technical experts and even recognized theorists, ought to and would accomplish wonders. I have hinted also at the possibility of a strong central organization in training and recruiting future executive personnel. Those possibilities might be carried much further, in the super-relationship between the American railroad and the rank and file of its employees. With a proper scheme of representation upon our United States Railroad--of which more in a moment--it might even be possible to have it supersede the present rather hapless Railroad Labor Board out at Chicago and so accomplish a real governmental economy. Yet remember that the actual hiring and the immediate relationship and authority between the railroad and its employee--no matter what his rank--should always remain with the regional organization. For remember also that it is largely for this purpose that we brought it into being--to better the human relationship between the human officer of the railroad and its human patron and its human employees. Contact alone does this. For this we have gone through to decentralization. We have tried to keep authority in these human relationships active and alert and acute upon the immediate ground. If we can accomplish that one great thing, if we can make our railroad of the United States as a huge mechanism of organization quickly responsive to the human being and his rights, it will be well worth the huge expense and trouble of decentralization. Remember all the while, if you will, that the one very great sore spot of our railroad problem is that we have thought too much of it always in terms of dollars and not enough of it in terms of men. I bear no particular grief for the organized bodies of shippers or for those of the employees. They are all entitled to fair treatment--and nothing more. The one group may easily become a pest, the other an autocrat. Yet a just consideration for the patron and for the employee is a rock upon which our railroads may stand secure, the lack of it a rock upon which they may inevitably crash. This may be poor epigram, but it is a solid fact. In fact I may go much further and state quite bluntly that no plan for the reorganization of our railroad system of the United States now has any real prospect of success that does not recognize in its fundamentals the need of a radically changed status for labor.