Since the greatest need is larger and better terminals, the process of improvement will be costly. Since the sum to be raised must be reckoned in billions, the railroads, if they are to maintain their wage scales, and their standards of efficiency, must be permitted to charge such rates as will enable them to pay interest on the additions to capitalization representing the money invested in new terminals, and also accumulate a surplus sufficient to take care of the constantly arising demands for additions to the existing plant. Courts and commissions will see that excessive rates are not collected. On the other hand the courts have affirmed the right of the companies to earn a reasonable return on the total value of their property. Between these well-marked lines the railway rate should move, according to the needs of traffic and the development of the business of the country. Rates either permanently unchanged at the present figure or lowered by compulsion mean, in view of the existing emergency, nothing but ruin. That ruin will not be so immediate or complete for the railroads themselves as it will be for the business interests to which they will no longer be able to give a prompt and adequate service. It will be far-reaching, because its effects will touch every man, however humble, who is engaged in productive industry. If it comes it will be the most disastrous catastrophe in all our business experience. The whole question may be summed up in the simple fact that the business of this country has grown beyond the possibility of being handled by a railroad system costing on an average $60,000 a mile. The experience of the whole world is against such a proposition. I do not underrate the importance of other interests or issues, I only give due place and emphasis to this question when I say that it dwarfs by comparison every other that bespeaks the attention of our people. What, in comparison are any of the innovations or interpretations of the national will which have recently formed the subject of a nation-wide and passionate discussion? Across every stream of commerce where it enters a distributing city an obstacle grows higher every day, restraining the impatient tide of the nation’s exchanges. It is time for all of us to lay aside prepossessions, hostilities, differences in points of view, and work together for an object infinitely more essential than most of the great enterprises deemed so national in their scope and benefits that they command not only the sympathy but the financial backing of the government itself.