You do not have to ask the average man twice for an answer to that question. He knows. If he is a business man he knows doubly well. He knows that for the last ten years our American railroad system has been in something of a decline. A decade ago it was at the zenith of its efficiency. For eighty years it had been climbing upward; for the last ten it has been slipping backward. Oh, yes, I do know its war record. It _was_ a fine record and one of which every American should be duly proud. There is hardly a physician, however, who has not seen a patient, terribly sick, under the stress of great emergency rise magnificently to a definite situation of supreme importance. So four years ago rose our sick man of American business. And now he has gone to bed more ill than ever before while many doctors quarrel about his case. And still he functions. The sick-abed man of our American business still renders the all-necessary service that none but him really can render. Fortunately perhaps American business itself at this moment is not in the very best of health. One shudders to think what would happen if industry all the way across the land were again in its top notches of production. It is not the least of the perplexing phases of this all-perplexing railroad problem of ours--the question, when traffic shall again rise (as it certainly will) to normal volume, to say nothing of any abnormal volume, of how our weakened railroad structure will meet it. That it recently withstood severe tests is of course no indication that it could again withstand such strains. All the way across the land our railroad functioned in the recent ordeals through which it has passed--which of course is not saying that it could do this again. It quite naturally worked at its best in the western sections of the land, where there are both less congestion and comparatively larger rail transport facilities. Yet as one came east he found the American railroad still meeting its responsibilities bravely and with a real degree of efficiency. One crossed the Missouri, the Mississippi, the Maumee, and still found the railroad functioning--the stout, pliable rod of its energy bending but never breaking. He came further east still, crossed the Susquehanna and then the Delaware, and still the rail carrier functioned. He came to the Hudson and found the battered and overburdened railroad machine still meeting its obligations, after a fashion at least.