Of late it has rather become the fashion among many otherwise thinking people of a degree of mentality to ascribe the many troubles of our railroads in this country either to the "high" wages that they are paying their employees or to over-regulation on the part of various governmental commissions, both State and Federal. Of the wage question I have said my last words in this book. Nor is the highly controversial question of regulation--or of so-called over-regulation--worth much discussion. From time to time some gifted (but uninformed) soul bursts into the public prints with the highly original suggestion that we should in some mysterious and occult fashion return to the days before 1887 when regulation of our rail carriers was an unknown art in these United States. It all has a rather fascinating sound, particularly to such people who may have been the witnesses or the victims, direct or indirect, of some of the ridiculous rulings that these commissions--particularly the State ones--occasionally hand down. Unquestionably there have been many foolish decisions. Unquestionably many of them have contradicted and offset one another. And the dabbling of the professional politician into the delicate centers of a transportation machine, of which he really knows nothing at all, has brought us a very great deal of trouble. But-- I do not believe that any thinking railroader or patron of the railroads--no matter what his job or what his degree or station in life--really would go back voluntarily to those uncouth, unregulated days of 1886 if he could possibly avoid it. In thirty-five years many things are forgotten. It once took our magazine muck-rakers nearly two decades to set down the great business evils that arose in those very days that now seem halcyon to us largely because thirty-five years have aided us so largely in the business of forgetting. Then there is the chap who cries for the return of a Hill or a Harriman--I do it myself at times; I had and still have much admiration for each of them--a Hill or a Harriman who with the wave of some mystic, magic wand will make all transportation things right once again. We Americans fairly worship a character of that sort, even though we may have largely created him within our own imaginations. We love to fall prone at his feet.