REMARKS TO A DELEGATION OF RAILWAY EMPLOYEES’ ORDERS—EXECUTIVE OFFICE, WASHINGTON, NOVEMBER 14, 1905 _Gentlemen_: I have just a word that I want to say to you. In the first place, I trust I need hardly say that no delegation will ever be more welcome at the White House than such a delegation as this. The interests of the wage-worker and the interests of the tiller of the soil must be peculiarly close to all American public men; among other reasons for the reason that if they prosper all other classes will prosper likewise as a matter of course. As I said the other day to the representatives of organized labor at Atlanta, I shall do everything in my power for the laboring man except to do anything wrong; for the man who will do anything wrong in the nominal interest of another man will also do wrong against this same other man if ever it becomes to his own interest to do so. Your associations deserve peculiar regard because you have developed to a marked degree the very qualities that all bodies of wage-workers should develop: the intelligence, the regard for the future, the self-respect mingled with the respect for others, the power of self-restraint, which are absolutely essential to any body of men which is to move upward and onward. Remember always that every man of us must in some shape or other have his passions and appetites governed; and the less of that government there is from within the more there will have to be from without. With most of the general statements that you make I agree, but I am not sure that I agree with your application of them. There has been comparatively little complaint to me of the railroad rates being as a whole too high. The most serious complaints that have been made to me have been of improper discrimination in railroad rates. For instance, in two recent cases affecting great corporations the complaints that have been made to me have been that they are too low as regards certain big shippers; the complaint in both these cases is about the differential, the difference of treatment of two sets of users of the railways, the difference in favor of one set of shippers as against another set of shippers. Whether this is just or not I am not prepared to say. I very deeply appreciate and sympathize with the feeling you express as to the community of interest between the man who actually does the handling of the trains, at the brakes, in the engine cab, as a fireman, as a conductor, and the man who has to do, as a capitalist or as the higher employee of the capitalist, with the general management of the road. I feel that one of the lessons that can not be overinculcated is the lesson of the identity of interest among our people as a whole. I do not have to tell a body like this something that I do have to tell some other bodies, and that is if you have not got at the head of a railroad a man who can make a success of it, the wage-workers on that railroad can not prosper. You must have at the