A thousand cars are a fleabite compared with the daily movement in the busy season. The railroads of the United States carried 1,849,900,101 tons of revenue freight in 1910. At the average load of 21.5 tons per car, it would take 86,041,865 cars to move it. Nearly all of these pass through some large terminal, most of them several times in the year. There are about thirty important traffic centers; and if the total movement were divided equally between them, supposing each car to pass through but one market, and that only once a year, 7,858 cars would have to pass through each terminal every day in the year. Five thousand cars a day are enough to create a blockade in many of the large terminals of the country. Our worst troubles have come not from insufficient rolling stock or lack of efficiency in handling it, but from congested terminals. Water routes give little assistance: first, because the largest streams of traffic in the United States are not in a direction where either natural or artificial waterways can be used; second, because a waterway less than twenty feet deep cannot compete as a carrier. The waterway, too, may and often does increase rather than lessen the pressure on terminal facilities. There is but one possible remedy--enlarged terminals. The main question back of that is financial. Where and on what terms is the money to be had for an improvement become as necessary as the removal of a freight wreck from a main traffic line. The two obstacles to be overcome in this readjustment of the transportation agency to the growing needs of the country are the physical difficulty and the cost. The railroads could not have foreseen and guarded against this need thirty or forty years ago. They could not then know where the greatest markets were to grow. They could not tell in what portion of any city it would be most convenient to have railroad yards placed a generation later. If they had secured land, changes in business districts would in many cases have made their forethought useless. Even if gifted with prophetic knowledge, they could not then have commanded the resources for such an undertaking, any more than the country town of today can put in all the improvements that its future as a city will require and justify. It is a natural and inevitable condition that we face. Upon the railroads rests the responsibility of performing the work now to be done. Will they be left free to attempt it under such conditions as will make the performance of it a feasible thing and not a miracle?