It now looks as if the United States was upon the threshold of the eight-hour day--in many, many forms of its industrial life. I believe that, in his heart, the average railroader--executive or employee--favors it, fairly and honestly and efficiently applied. It has been charged as the first large step forward toward the government operation of our railroads, yet I cannot see it as nearly as large a step as the extension of the maximum weight of packages entrusted to the parcel post, a system which if further extended--and apparently both legally and logically extended--might enable a man to go up to Scranton and place enough postage stamps upon the sides of a carload of coal to send it to his factory siding at tidewater. Compared with this the eight-hour day is as nothing as a step toward government operation or ownership. A genuine eight-hour day is, of course, a long step toward the nationalization of our railroads--quite a different matter, if you please. President Wilson's entire plan, as it has already been briefly outlined, forms a very definite step toward such nationalization. It at once supersedes the indefinite quality of the Newlands committee hearings--no more indefinite at that than the average hearing of a legislative committee. When the Wilson plan has been adopted, fully and squarely and honestly, either by this Congress or by the next, it will then be the order of the day to take up some of the next steps, not so much, perhaps, toward the nationalization of our railroads as toward the further bettering of their efficiency and their broadening to take advantage of some of their great latent opportunities as carriers of men and of goods. * * * * * The men who control our railroads today look forward to such a definite program with hope, but not without some misgivings. For, after all, we are by no means nationally efficient, and there seems to be a wide gulf between the making of our economic plans and their execution. No wonder, then, that the railroads are dubious. They are uncertain. They have been advised and threatened and legislated and regulated until they are in a sea of confusion, with apparently no port ahead. The extent of the confusion is indicated not alone by their failure to handle the traffic that has come pouring in upon them in the last days of the most active industrial period that America ever has known, but by the failure of their securities to appeal to the average investor--a statement which is easily corroborated by a study of recent Wall Street reports. And what would be a bad enough situation at the best has been, of course, vastly complicated by the labor situation.