Railroad people and their representatives have written voluminously, likewise _fetchingly_, to prove to an easily “bubbled” public that the government has been paying too _little_ rather than too much for the rail carriage of its mails. I have read numerous such vestibuled productions. They were all good; top-branch verbiage and rhetoric, so smooth, noiseless and jarless in coupling that the uncritical reader’s sympathies are often aroused, and his conviction or belief enlisted by the sheer massive grandeur of the terminology used. Try almost any of these _promotion_ railway mail-pay talkers and throw the belt on your own thought-mill while you read. Four times in five the ulterior-motive writer or speaker will have you rolling into the roundhouse or repair shop before you know you have even been coupled onto the train. When you emerge, if your thinker is still off its belt, you will find yourself about ready to “argue” that the railroads are very much underpaid, if, indeed, not grossly wronged by the government. I would like to quote some of the picture arguments from several of these railway studios but cannot. As illustrative of the general _ensemble_ of these forensic art productions, I will, however, reproduce here a gem from one of them--a bit of verbal canvas so generic and homelike as to class as a bit of real _genre_. The reader will find it in Pearson’s Magazine for June, 1911. Who personally perpetrated it, I know not, and the magazine sayeth not. The editor of Pearson’s, however, assures us that the article from which the following excerpt is made, was “prepared” by the authority and under the direction of the Committee on Railway Mail Pay, and as prominent members of said committee the editor gives the names of _Julius Kruttschnitt_, Director of Maintenance and Operation, Union and Southern Pacific Systems; _Ralph Peters_, President and General Manager, Long Island Railroad; _Charles A. Wickersham_, President and General Manager, Western Railway of Alabama; _W. W. Baldwin_, Vice-President, C. B. & Q. Railroad; _Frank Barr_, Third Vice-President and General Manager of the Boston and Maine Railroad. That is certainly a representative quintette of railway artists and generally recognized as qualified to produce--verbally--almost anything in railway art, from a freehand tariff to a “car shortage” done in oil while the crops ought to be moving. Am sorry I cannot quote more extendedly. The following, however, will give the reader a sample of the “style” and also of the “argument” common to most of the _protective and promotive railway word pictures_: