"Only (2) and (3) now enter into rates. It is as cheap to arrive at New York at the Pennsylvania, or New York Central Station, as to drop the train in Newark or Tarrytown. It is as cheap to ship freight to a New York dock as to unload it from the car at a country siding. "In the New York Subway the cost of (1), (3) and (4) sinks to a vanishing point, and nothing is left but the flat cost of running trains and a flat revenue per passenger. "In steam railroads operation costs of both (1) and (2) are very great, but not made up by revenue. The fifth element that ought to govern charges is a principle that even frogs know all about, but which human beings operating railroads have not yet learned, namely, to put on flat and expand when prices are high so as to accumulate a surplus to tide over the lean years. This fifth element is really included in (3) classification. Railroads now have different rates for different commodities, but $1.80 a bushel wheat and $0.20 cotton are not the same as $0.50 wheat and $0.05 cotton. The wheat raised and the cotton grown, and the iron made into pig iron at $30.00 a ton can afford to pay rates that vary with the price. "Piece rates applied to traffic is the tuberculosis that is gradually but surely consuming our railroads."--Harrington Emerson. [16] As an evidence of the fact that the sick man of American business has by no means lost his ability to render service, consider what might have seemed to travelers a minor detail of ordinary service, and yet was in reality a tremendous task. On a certain snowy morning in January, 1917, traffic into New York was unusually heavy. The great automobile show was just opening, folk were flocking to it from all corners of the country. The facilities of even as great a railroad as the New York Central were severely taxed. Its Twentieth Century Limited was in three sections, the Detroiter in two, Train Six in three. On these and two other trains due into the Grand Central Station between 8 and 9:40 a. m., 1,200 persons were served with breakfast. This breakfast required sixteen dining-cars, eighty-two stewards, cooks, and assistants, and 105 waiters. Advance advice was received of the requirements, the cars assembled, the crews brought together, and everything made ready to attach the cars to the train at Albany in the early morning. And this was all in addition to the regular dining-car service of the road. [17] And now Congress has adjourned without passing the supplementary feature of the Adamson bill--the all important requirement of arbitration in labor disputes.