The whole question was so big and so vital that even despite war-time pressure the Lane Commission took until May, 1918, to render its decision in favor of considerable increases to almost every type and rank of railroad worker. It unquestionably was a fair decision. Some that followed may not have been so fair; McAdoo unquestionably was led far afield himself by some of his advisers in elaborate and almost absurd attempts at standardized wage and working agreements. Yet at the time he took over the railroads for the Government the rank and file of railroaders unquestionably were underpaid--in certain cases grossly underpaid, and with their living costs rising by leaps and by bounds. This entire question of railroad labor, its rights and its wage, is so involved and so complicated in detail that I am going to leave it for another portion of this book. It is enough to say here in review of the McAdoo administration that on December 15, 1917, thirteen days before he assumed control, the total number of employees upon the Class I roads of the land (87 per cent. of the railroad mileage of the country; all save the lines with gross revenues of less than a million dollars a year) was 1,703,685; on January 15, 1919, four days after he had relinquished control, it had grown to 1,843,530--an increase of 139,846, or 8.2 per cent. Yet the pay-roll expense, which had been 61.48 per cent. of all operating costs in 1917, had only risen to 65.62 per cent. It was not until the following year that an average increase of nearly 50 per cent. in railroad wages was granted, in the face of a still generally increasing cost of living. But by the next year McAdoo was out of the job. The Armistice had been signed on November 11, 1918, and immediately thereafter Mr. Wilson gave heed to Mr. McAdoo's protestations that, the war-time emergency having passed, he was no longer needed and that he must go out into the world to recoup his shattered personal fortune. Accordingly he ceased to be director-general of the United States Railroad Administration on January 11, 1919, and was immediately succeeded by his right-hand assistant, Walker D. Hines, whom we have seen already as the one-time chairman of the board of the immensely important Santa Fe railway system. Hines is in many ways the very antithesis of McAdoo. There is nothing dramatic or spectacular about him whatever. On the contrary he is what he began to be, a typical corporation lawyer, cool-headed, judicial, shrewd, and honest. He probably would tell you himself that he broadened a good deal down in the offices of the Railroad Administration. I could see the changes. He became vastly more human; his Washington experience seemed to quicken his sympathies and to broaden his understanding of men.