questions of public policy, the activity of the Southern and the Trunk Line Associations has attracted chief attention. The man whose name is most prominently identified with both these systems is Albert Fink. A German by birth and education, his long experience as a practical railroad engineer did not deprive him of a taste for studying traffic problems on their theoretical side. As Vice-President of the Louisville & Nashville, he had given special attention to the economic conditions affecting the Southern roads; and when, in the years 1873-75, a traffic association was formed by a number of these roads to secure harmony of action on matters of common interest, he became the recognized leader. His success in arrangements for through traffic was so conspicuous that when, in 1877, the trunk lines were exhausted with an unusually destructive war of rates, they looked to him as the only man who could deliver them from their trouble. In some lines, division of traffic had already been resorted to; but it was in the hands of outside parties, like the Standard Oil Company or the cattle eveners, and was made a means of oppression against shippers not in the combination itself. [Illustration: Albert Fink.] The conditions were not favorable; the result of Fink's efforts to bring order out of chaos was slow and by no means uninterrupted. Yet on the whole, as was admitted even by opponents of the pooling system, it contributed to steadiness and equality of rates. The arrangement of these agreements was hampered by their want of legal status. While the law did not at that time actually prohibit them, it refused to enforce them. Existing thus on sufferance, they depended on the good will of the contracting parties. None but a man of Fink's unimpeached integrity and high intellectual power could have kept matters running at all; and even he could not prevent the adoption of a policy of making hay while the sun shines, more or less regardless of the future. The results of the trunk-line pool were unsatisfactory--most of all to those who believed in pools as a system; but it is fair to attribute a large part of this failure to the absence of legal recognition, which in a manner compelled the agreements to be arranged to meet the demands of the day rather than of the future.