So to-day the president of the railroad has fortified himself in the only possible way--by creating vice-presidencies. Each ranking department to-day is apt to be recognized in council by a vice-president; and these heads form a cabinet as informal as that of the Federal Government and, in its way, quite as important. Legal traffic, and engineering traffic each demands a vice-president at that cabinet-board, and gets him. The general manager usually is the vice-president representing operation. One big road has eight vice-presidents. It is indeed a poor property that cannot show three or four men that are the fittest to hold this title. There is another cabinet where the president must sit, which is formal and recognized; it is the board of directors. Between it and the lesser cabinet the president must take good care that he is not ground as between millstones. The cabinet of his department heads will tell him how he can spend his money; but he must get it from the upper cabinet. It is not always harmonious pulling in the upper cabinet. Imagine for a moment the troubles that sometimes arise in the lower. You are sitting in the office of a big railroad president, talking straight to that big-shouldered soul himself. Outside is the shadowy roof of the train-shed of a terminal, which is filled with long lines of cars that come and go, of platforms that are black with humans one instant and quite deserted the next. The room has the quiet elegance of a comfortable home library. There are long rows of books upon the shelves; a great table is set squarely in the centre. But it is business--for a ticker is slowly spelling the fate of that railroad and every other railroad, upon the endless tape; a huge map of the system--many thousands of miles of high-class railroad--lies under the glass that covers the table top. "They don't always pull together," the president of the railroad admits, when you ask him about the lower cabinet. "Sometimes they pull apart when they have honestly different ideas as to policy, and other times--there's to be a big college football game up at G---- next Saturday. We have only two private cars for our four vice-presidents, every single blessed one of whom wants to go. I don't want to go myself, and I've contributed my car, but we're one short then, and the man that's left is going around like a boy who's had a chip knocked off his shoulder. He's just been in here, and I've settled the matter by hiring a car for his party from the Pullman folks and footing the bill myself. I sent him out ashamed of himself.