passenger revenue of our railroads in 1921 was 23 per cent. less than in the preceding year. Which is commended to the attention of official Washington. Consider now the railroads handed back on March 1, 1920, to their old-time owners--Fairfax Harrison returning from his temporary habitat at Richmond to his familiar offices in the Southern Railway building in the city of Washington, Mr. Rea, Mr. Willard, Mr. Underwood, and others who were temporarily deposed from power triumphantly returning to it. Triumph is the word. The Southern signalized its return to its own by having its new time-tables, fashioned with their familiar yellow covers and with the odious words, "United States Railroad Administration," glaringly missing, ready upon that memorable first day of March. It did more. Upon its lines it terminated instanter the use of the Railroad's Administration passes which had been given rather freely to the henchmen of that branch of Federal service. Other roads quickly ended the life of those passes; but generally gave their holders time to get home with them. Not so with the Southern. For it the U. S. R. A. cardboards ended their value at midnight on February 29, 1920. After that they were good as souvenirs, and as nothing else. The unlucky wight who chanced to hold one, and no other pass, paid his fare from midnight on. Personal feelings again came into play. One Federal manager of an Eastern railroad, who had had the audacity to move his former chief, the corporation's president, out of an office that the old man loved, lost his job for his temerity. He was not the only executive who lost his job. R. H. Aishton, who had been president of the Chicago and Northwestern railway at the time of the creation of the United States Railroad Administration, and whose rare ability as an operating executive had been recognized by McAdoo in his appointment to the post of the regional director at Chicago, did not return to his old position. It is understood that he incurred the disfavor of Marvin Hughitt. Mr. Hughitt is the last of the old guard of American railroad executives. He was born near Auburn, New York, in 1837, has lived in Illinois since 1854, and at eighty-five years of age is still the active controlling influence in the great Northwestern property. He has, to my knowledge, but one senior in the whole business, Chauncey M. Depew, chairman of the board of the New York Central railroad, who is eighty-nine years old; but Mr. Depew long since was very glad to relinquish the reins of operating detail of that great Vanderbilt property to younger and more energetic men.