Here, then, is the answer, here the way that in a military crisis we may also gain a double-track transcontinental route across the north edge of the country. We simply need to take two out of the three single-track lines there--the Milwaukee, the Northern Pacific, and the Great Northern--and by keeping the traffic moving in a single direction, we gain at once a practical and effective double-track railroad. This method can be repeated in the South from Chicago to El Paso and thence across to Los Angeles, by a similar operating combination of the Santa Fé, the Rock Island, the El Paso and Southwestern, and the Southern Pacific. The map itself will suggest numerous other combinations of the same sort. Physically, the railroads of the United States are today wonderfully well adapted to any military crisis that they might be asked to meet. And the constant raising of their efficiency during the past decade, because of the growing tendency of expenses to overlap income, has done nothing to impair their military value. Potentially, they are fit and ready. Ready, they are actually; fit and ready is an entirely different matter. Let us come to it, here and now. * * * * * Suppose that tomorrow the "cry of war" were to resound from one end of this country to the other, that an army of at least 1,000,000 men were to spring into being as quickly and as easily as all these pacificists aver. Immediately the railroads would be called to their superhuman tasks of transporting men and horses, and motor trucks, munitions, and materials of every sort. And somewhere this great problem of military rail transport would have to center. Today, in times of peace, it centers in the Quartermaster's Department of the War Department, which contracts with the railroads for the carrying of troops and supplies just as any private organization might arrange. The existing study of the War Department provides that in the declaration of war the railroads shall be operated by the Board of Engineers. Yet to a large extent this earlier study has been superseded by President Wilson in the appointment of a Council of National Defense to take over the industrial, commercial, and social mobilization of the United States in case of a great crisis. As a member of this council Mr. Wilson has appointed Daniel Willard, of the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad, in direct charge of the transportation and communication, in such a crisis. Of this, much more will be said in a moment.