You specify your new business and its requirements in some detail. The eye of this practical Minister of Commerce illumines. "I have the very thing you want," he says, without hesitation. "Over at W----, just half a mile above the city limits along the river. It has siding facilities." (You may be fairly certain that the siding facilities give chief access to the railroad that employs this particular Commissioner.) "And you say you want fresh water. Well, there's five thousand gallons a day of the purest soft water in the East for you." His eyes shine with enthusiasm. He reaches for his paper block and the next instant he is sketching the plot for you with remarkable accuracy, and with a similitude of scale. Here is the river and there is where you can build your dam. Over there is the main line of the best railroad in America (he leaves no doubt in your mind as to that); and your siding can go in there with less than a quarter of one per cent grade. The highroad is there, and close by it the trolley leading into town. "They've a surplus of help of the kind you want in W----," he adds. "You'll never run short of hands there." It sounds good, and within a week you are bound to W---- with him to meet the Secretary of the Chamber of Commerce. If things are as he has represented them to you, and your mind is unbiased, you build your factory, and the railroad picks up 200 tons a day off your siding. That single transaction has been worth the Commissioner's salary for a year to it. There is a variety of method in making traffic. * * * * * The general passenger agent has to keep his end up. Any G. P. A. of to-day found entertaining the old-fashioned idea that the traffic that flows of its own volition up to the ticket-wickets is going to be sufficient to satisfy his employers is out of present-day development. The general passenger agent who gets patted on the back nowadays is the man who goes to the president in a dull season with a sheet showing gains over a preceding busy season. He may have to bring water from stones to increase that tide of traffic, but it must be increased. There are no two ways about what is expected of him. So he gets out, like the traffic people from the freight end of the railroad, and he keeps in constant touch with his territory, with the towns along the line and the agents who are working under him. If he is instrumental in locating a big convention at some point where his line will receive the lion's share of the business, that is a good trick and worth while. A lively convention will do a lot toward bracing up a weak passenger sheet in some dull month.