Let me repeat. Monticello has definite rights to adequate railroad transportation. And this holds true whether that transportation comes from the Government or the individual. Monticello--ten thousand Monticellos, if you please--has a considerable voting population. And once the real war emergency was passed and the Armistice safely signed, ten thousand Monticellos began asking if government operation was going to offer them no better relief from the ills of private operation. It was as nothing to them that there had been a saving of trains and of train mileage between Chicago and St. Louis with no apparent diminution of the service between those two metropolitan cities; they simply knew that there had been a great lessening of their own service. And while they were willing to accept such a lessening as a part of their war sacrifice they did not intend to accept it as a permanent transportation condition, either from the Government or from private capital. This general plan held, however. There are some pretty big and powerful Monticellos between Chicago and the coast. Denver is one of them, Omaha is another, Kansas City a third. And because, to make a single instance, any one of these cities demands a fairly quick and efficient service to Portland and the Puget Sound points, it was necessary after a time to modify to some extent the simplified route plan and to give these intermediate points through train service, or at least through Pullman service. These changes and others like them have brought great savings in passenger mileage. That cannot be denied, even though one is tempted to add a doubting corollary as to the shattering of the finest passenger service that any land ever has received. The war crisis demanded curtailments. The railroads themselves had recognized that, even before the coming of the McAdoo administration. From May 1, 1917, up to the end of that year their War Board succeeded in reducing the passenger service by 28,656,983 train-miles. Yet this was not a circumstance to the slashing done by the Federal Administration. In September, 1918, McAdoo reported to President Wilson that he had succeeded in eliminating passenger-trains to the extent of 47,420,000 additional miles a year, a really astounding total.