But, as the traffic grew, it was necessary that the railroad should grow. Despite supreme difficulties in finding credit it did manage to invest some $4,042,000,000 in property expansions and reconstructions during the seven years from 1907 to 1914. Yet this very money must be paid for, and, in view of the gradually impaired credit, paid for rather generously. At five per cent, this expenditure represents an added annual interest charge of $202,101,000 to the railroads of the United States, a figure whose great size may be the better appreciated when one realizes that it is considerably more than half a million dollars a day. Against this increased outgo one must measure increased revenues for 1914 over 1907, of $452,188,000--one deals in large figures when one speaks of the earnings and expenses of more than a quarter of a million miles of railroad. Yet even increased earnings of more than $400,000,000 are not so impressive when one finds that operating expenses and taxes in 1914 were $506,888,000 higher than in 1907. And both operating expenses and taxes are far higher in 1916 than they were in 1914. Hold this picture up to the light. I have begun to develop the huge plate for you. Now study its details for yourself. An investment of $4,000,000,000--more than ten times the cost of the Panama Canal--produced, at the end of a seven-year cycle, increased transportation earnings of more than $450,000,000; yet it required $500,000,000, or an excess in a single year of more than $50,000,000, to meet the pay-roll, material tax, and other costs of operating the railroads. And in this figure we have not taken account of that annual interest charge of more than half a million dollars a day for the huge $4,000,000,000 investment fund. That interest charge cannot be ignored. Bankers demand their pay. Add the deficit in a single year--a normal year, if you please. Here it is--$54,698,000 plus $202,100,000--and you have a total deficit of $256,798,000. And this is but a single year. The years that preceded it were no better.