Take a look at your railroad map. Look sharply! You will need to look sharply to see the second line of communication between New England and the rest of the nation. There it is--a thin and wavering railroad line, stretching from New Haven up through the Connecticut hills, spanning the Hudson on the slender tracery of the Poughkeepsie bridge and threading still more hills until it reaches Trenton, New Jersey, and the main base line once again. The nation may yet thank a gentleman named Charles S. Mellen for that second line of communication. For while the much discussed ex-president of the New Haven did not build the Poughkeepsie bridge or the New England lines leading to it, he at least caused both of them to be double-tracked, curves and grades ironed out until one heavily laden coal train could follow close upon the heels of another. [Illustration: AMERICA'S "VITAL AREA" The workshops and the coalbins of the United States, together with the principal railroads which must protect them. This bird's-eye map made as though viewed from an aeroplane at a point five hundred miles off of Cape Cod.] That was Mellen's motive in making a large part of this second line of communication into first-class railroad--the perfecting of New England's long, lean arm down into the Pennsylvania coal bin. But no matter what his motive--he has never pretended to be altruistic--his coal line is of great strategic value. Not alone does it circle around metropolitan New York at a reasonably safe distance, but it intersects the great trunk lines running west from the seaboard--routes that would be of unspeakable strategic value in the case of the seizure of our largest city. For these would be the lines that would have to feed our army--not with mere food, but with men and guns and shells and all that with these go. At Poughkeepsie this second line of communication intersects the main stem of the New York Central, in turn the main stem of the Vanderbilt system reaching almost every important city west of the Alleghenies and east of the Mississippi and north of the Ohio. At Goshen it intersects the Erie Railroad, come in these recent years from being a reproach and a byword into one of the most efficiently operated railroads in the entire land. Farther south it intersects the Lackawanna and the Lehigh Valley--roads rich in money and in resources.