The chief criticism launched against the first director-general of the Railroad Administration is in regard to his handling of railroad labor. The more conservative the mind that you scratch upon this extremely delicate topic the more violent the immediate reaction. "Barron's Weekly," published by the "Wall Street Journal," regards Mr. McAdoo's attitude toward railroad labor as that of an arch-tyrant. But that is merely typical Wall Street attitude and to be dismissed as such. I had, as I have already said, very little sympathy with the director-general's addresses to the men at Pueblo and at El Paso, where he assured them that at last they had come into the rights which had been denied them and that hereafter they were to receive the square deal. That was unnecessary. More than unnecessary, it was unfair. And more than that, it was an extremely dangerous doctrine to be preaching, particularly at that time. I cannot see how it possibly could do one single thing toward upbuilding railroad morale, the thing needed at that moment more than anything else. It could scarcely do else than lower that shattered morale still further. And it is possible that Mr. McAdoo regrets at this moment that he ever gave utterance to those two speeches, patting railroad labor on the back when railroad labor should have been congratulating itself that it was not conscripted and sent into the trenches. This is said with all deference and with a high regard for railroad labor in the United States. On the other hand McAdoo did a most commendable and forward-looking thing when he gave labor a fair place in his official cabinet. Then and there he played a trump card that private ownership and operation of our railroads forever and a day had failed to play. He played another when at the very beginning of his term of office he put the entire question of wages in the hands of a competent commission headed by the late Franklin K. Lane, of whose fairness and ability there could be no question whatsoever. Mr. Lane knew men; he also knew railroads. He was perhaps the one man in the United States who might have taken the Railroad Administration and made an unqualified success of it. The ablest member of the Wilson cabinet, he was compelled to take a back seat in the big war drama. His capabilities and his experience were virtually ignored. The Lane Commission went more carefully into the question of railroad wages than any one had ever before gone. It did what no individual railroad or group of railroads ever had the intelligence or the courage or the fairness to do--attempted to make some sort of impartial analysis of living costs to the railroader, and to use these as a basis for the fixing of his wage. The question of compensation never has been placed upon a scientific basis.