So spake the general manager of a British railway to me one day last year. He sounded a real truth. In their prosperous days our American railroads were decidedly loath to share their profits; some of their more captious critics were not slow to say that they had capitalized their underpaid helpers and were paying dividends on the remainder. A few roads, notably the prosperous Santa Fe and the Southern Pacific, in the golden days before the war had made a beginning toward bonus and profit-sharing systems but these were in the vast minority. I should like to see those extremely prosperous railroads, the Burlington and the Lackawanna, resurrect the experiment. It should not be left to Henry Ford to accomplish all the railroad experimentation in this country. Offhand the job of a passenger trainman, such as my friend up on the Northern Pacific, may not seem to be a particularly strenuous one even though it is long-houred. Here is a harder one. On a test running across Wyoming not long ago the husky boy with the shovel in the engine-cab tossed six thousand pounds of coal an hour from the tender into the fire-box. The run was six hours long. If you do not even yet get the measure of his job, go down into your cellar, find that there are eighteen tons of coal there and then shovel it from one side of the cellar to the other--in six hours. Repeat the entire process three or four times in the course of a week and then write and tell me which you had rather fire on--a coal-burner without a mechanical stoker, an oil-burner, or one of those big electric locomotives up on the Chicago, Milwaukee, and St. Paul, where the fireman's chief job is to keep awake against the lazy droning of the motors to be prepared in the always-possible emergency that he may have to take control of the craft. Here is a final instance or two of what I mean. From one point in California to another 170 miles distant is a typical operating division of one of the biggest roads in our Southwest--a little longer than typical Eastern operating divisions in fact. It is provided that freights moving from the one to the other shall do so at the average rate of twelve and one-half miles an hour; which means thirteen hours and thirty-six minutes for the division. That therefore becomes its official running-time. Anything beyond that fairly good lapse of continuous labor was paid for as overtime "pro-rata." In other words, the train-crew was paid the same figure for its sixteenth hour of continuous service as for its first one, and the incentive for the railroad to cut down its overtime is gone. That is why the rank and file of railroaders were fighting so strenuously three years ago to gain time-and-one-half pay for their overtime, beyond a basic eight-hour day. It is the only way that they could see for bettering their actual conditions of labor--for getting in that occasional fishing-trip or the journey with the wife over the hills in the long-distance jitney.