Out of that chaos came the B. & O. of to-day, a substantial and well-managed railroad property. Mr. Garrett was the first of the railroaders to construct a single property from the Atlantic seaboard to the Mississippi; John F. Cowan, L. F. Loree, Oscar G. Murray, and Daniel Willard have been his successors in the revamping of the B. & O., eliminating its costly grades, enlarging yard and terminal facilities, and making the historic road a carrier of the first class. * * * * * The history of the Erie Railroad is hardly less dramatic than that of the Baltimore & Ohio; its financial disasters were not owing to the errors that come of crass stupidity. For the Erie did its good part in the making of railroad law. Built and operated in the earliest railroad days as a single enterprise through the southern tier of counties of New York State from the Hudson River to Lake Erie, while the roads to the north that were eventually to be welded by Commodore Vanderbilt into the great New York Central were still quarrelling among themselves, it was wrecked time and time again by unscrupulous schemes of high finance. It was made to wear mill-stones in the shape of outrageous bonded indebtednesses that acted as a fearful handicap for many years and prevented a remarkably well located property from standing to-day as the peer of the Pennsylvania or of the New York Central. The story of these outrages has been told and retold--they are integral parts of the financial history of the country. Suffice it to say here and now that the Erie has been operated with more or less success by no less than four struggling corporations; that it has never come closer to achieving success than under its present president, F. D. Underwood; and that no one save those who have stood close to Underwood has known or appreciated the heritage of handicap that was given to him to shoulder. For it has been part of our railroad principle in this country--a mighty sad part, too--that no matter how villainously stocks and bonds may have been issued at any time--only to bring failure swiftly and inevitably,--such bogus paper has always been protected in reorganization. A railroad which becomes bankrupt cannot be abandoned. That has been done only in rare cases. Even the Baltimore & Ohio, at the end of its rope less than twenty years ago, was not permitted to abandon its passenger service. It must pull itself up out of the difficulties, and--in America at least--it must pull its trashy paper up too, in order that no holder of such paper may be unprotected. The paper can no more be abandoned than the right-of-way. The result is seen in railroads staggering under vast and questionable capitalization (there is no cleaning of the slate); but the sins of those that have gone before are truly visited upon the third and the fourth generation, as well as upon the poor humans who, under such burdens, are trying to operate a railroad property.