For it is almost as much as your very life is worth to "talk back" to a street car conductor in Pittsburgh. The conductor is probably an arm of the big political machine that holds that western Pennsylvania town as in the hollow of its hand. The conductors get their jobs through their alderman, and they hold them through their alderman. So if a New York man forgets that he is four hundred and forty miles from Broadway, and gets to asserting his mind to the man who is in charge of the car let him look out for trouble. Chances are nine to one that he will be hauled up before a magistrate for breaking the peace, and that another arm of the political machine will come hard upon him. A man, who was a life-long resident of Pittsburgh, once made a protest to the conductor of a car coming across from Allegheny. The passenger was in the right and the conductor knew it. But he answered that protest with a volley of profanity. If that thing had happened in a seaboard town, the conductor's job would not have been worth the formality of a resignation. In Pittsburgh a bystander warned--the passenger--and he saved himself arrest by keeping his mouth shut and getting off the car. But the Pittsburgh man had not quite lost his sense of justice, and so he hurried to a certain high officer of the street railroad company. When he came to the company's offices he was ushered in in high state, for it so happened that the born Pittsburgh man was a director of that very corporation. It so happens that street railroad directors do not ride--like their steam railroad brethren--on passes, and the conductor did not know that he was playing flip-flap with his job. "You'll have to fire that man," said the director, in ending his complaint. "If that had happened at the club I would have punched him in the head." The big man who operated the street railroad looked at the director, and smiled what the lady novelists call a sweet, sad smile. "Sorry, Ben," said he, "but I know that man. He's one of Alderman X----'s men, and if we fired him X---- would hang us up on half a dozen things." Do you wonder that in the face of such a state of things transit relief comes rather slowly to Pittsburgh?