"This is a danger place," he said, "and a mighty bad one at that. That tower's too far away to guard this cross-over. I want you to put two flagmen here at all hours and let them personally signal and safeguard every engine that crosses these main-line tracks." Then he went back to his own big office, feeling that the responsibility for that danger place was off his own shoulders, in part at least. The division superintendent put in the requisition for the four men he needed. The requisition enmeshed itself in the red-tape at the general offices of the system. Some smart young assistant auditor there, who couldn't tell a coal-pocket from a gravity-yard, and who was 400 miles away, remembered that he had been ordered to cut the pay-roll--and the requisition went into the waste-basket. The division superintendent did not try to get another requisition for those flagmen through. He did the next best thing and told the towerman in the cabin--almost half a mile away--to keep as good a watch as possible of the cross-over. The inevitable came early one evening, in an October fog. The Chicago Fast Mail ran into an engine returning from the coal-pockets and there were half a dozen dead when the wreck was cleared away. The division superintendent was hurriedly summoned down to the general manager's office. "I cautioned you against trying to operate that cross-over without special signalmen," that officer said, as he discharged the superintendent and so cleared himself of the responsibility. And that is where the modern system of excessive consolidation in our big land carriers turned one good, faithful railroad executive into a howling anarchist. An illogical system has developed from this rapid expansion of the great individual railroad properties. As its most interesting phase, it offers the man who is farthest away from the detail of operation as the man who decides. One man takes the judgment of another and both of them are far removed, perhaps, from the seat of the very trouble that they seek to remedy. The man on the ground is powerless in the matter.