While revenue was shrinking, the obligatory expenses of the railways of the country have increased enormously. Their equipment alone is valued at nearly three and a half billion dollars; the increase during the last nine years being 45.3 per cent in locomotives and 39.7 per cent in freight cars. For the mere maintenance of equipment they spent over $413,000,000 in 1910. When we come to consider operation, the figures mount as rapidly as those on a pressure gauge when the needle is racing toward the danger point. The wages of the railroad employes in this country have reached the stupendous total of over $1,200,000,000 a year. According to the advance summary of the report of the Interstate Commerce Commission for 1911, the total number of employes in the United States decreased in that year by 29,611 as compared with 1910, while the total wages paid increased by $64,741,164. In no other occupation has such a showing ever been made. If the wage scale of 1899 had been in effect, the item of labor cost would have been some $300,000,000 less. Against liberal wages the railways do not protest, because they know that they can render safe, adequate and satisfactory service in proportion as their employes are well fitted and well paid for their work. But new outlay must be balanced by new income unless operation is to cease. Public sentiment almost always supports the demand of employes for higher wages. Public sentiment cannot, from the point of view of either justice or safety, continue to prohibit or prevent the levying of such rates as alone will enable the employer to pay the wage rate in many cases practically imposed from without as authoritatively as are the traffic rates that a commission orders into effect.