"It doesn't bother us much," the foreman tells you. "Still, on the Monday before Christmas we had a fairly brisk day. We had 155 cars of turkeys alone that morning." CHAPTER XXII MAKING TRAFFIC ENTICING SETTLERS TO THE VIRGIN LANDS OF THE WEST--EMIGRATION BUREAUS--RAILWAYS EXTENDED FOR THE BENEFIT OF EMIGRANTS--THE FIRST CONTINUOUS RAILROAD ACROSS THE AMERICAN CONTINENT--CAMPAIGNS FOR DEVELOPING SPARSELY SETTLED PLACES IN THE WEST--UNPROFITABLE BRANCH RAILROADS IN THE EAST--DEVELOPMENT OF SCIENTIFIC FARMING--IMPROVED FARMS ARE TRAFFIC-MAKERS--NEW FACTORIES BEING OPENED--HOW RAILROAD MANAGERS HAVE DEVELOPED ATLANTIC CITY. Your railroad manager of other days was content with the traffic that was offered him--if indeed he deigned to accept it all. For those were the business methods that obtained everywhere in the other days. When competition became the moving force in modern business, the railroad felt it. The land had become gridironed with tracks; business did not offer itself so freely as it had at the outset. When there came a division between routes of a traffic that had formerly belonged to a single route, earnings fell away and stockholders began to ask uncomfortable questions of the men who operated their railroad properties. Then the fight for business began--at first, as we have already seen, by a lively rivalry which showed itself in a merciless slashing of rates. Such fighting methods reacted on the railroads, and their rate-sheets became code and law, only a little less holy than the Federal Constitution, long before the Interstate Commerce Commission exerted its beneficent paternalism over the railroads of the land. But with the rates equalized between the railroads, the competition remained. The one obvious solution of the situation which was left was put into effect. The railroads began to make traffic.