It is not too late for the men who control our railroads to offset such brutal forms of proselyting by raising the status of their unorganized labor--voluntarily and in advance of possible legislation, if you please; with a generosity of heart that cannot fail to make a warm appeal to public sentiment. It is not too late for our railroads, on their own part, to consider labor from as scientific and as modern a viewpoint as they do their physical and financial problems. It is not too late for them to raise up high executives who shall make labor, its emoluments and its privileges, its possibilities of evolution their whole study. In an earlier chapter of this book we discussed this matter in detail; called attention to the lack of new blood of the right sort coming to the ranks of the railroad, to the opportunity of fixing wages upon a purely scientific as well as a cost-of-living basis; suggested even the broad possibilities of the bonus system as well as the abandonment of the complicated double basis of payment to trainmen which has crept into effect. Upon these foundations the pay envelopes of the railroad worker in the future must be figured. If the railroads themselves are incapable of so establishing it--and in full fairness to them it must be stated that the time may have passed when they were capable of accomplishing this, unaided at least--then the national government must step in and do it. The Interstate Commerce Commission may be asked to establish, with compulsory arbitration, not only a minimum but a maximum rate which the railroad may pay its various classes of employees--and so still another great step will be taken in the nationalization of our system of transportation. Call it socialism, if you like; I do not, but I do feel that it is another large step toward nationalization. Moreover, the very consideration of the topic brings us at once to the greatest immediate necessity of the railroad--unified regulation. * * * * * Unified regulation is the crux of the railroad situation today, from the railroad executive's, the investor's, and the patron's point of view. Your wiser executive is holding the question of increased rates in abeyance for the moment. He is devoting his best thought and his best energy toward simplifying and bettering railroad control. He has a frank, honest motive in so doing. Not only will he build toward permanence of the great national institution with which he is connected but he will begin also to induce Capital--the wherewithal with which to build up properties and pay-rolls and possibilities--to come once again toward the bedside of the sick man.