Do you chance to recall the conductor of yesteryear--conceding no more than his blue cap to the growing use of uniforms in a republican country; somewhat unkempt perhaps as to clothes--yet benevolent and fatherly in his way? Did that sickly-looking woman at the end of the coach fumble and then attempt a feeble and impotent smile when he asked her for her ticket? And did he, with a sublime myopia, pass her by without demanding that bit of pasteboard? Your old-time conductor knew the difference between impostors--even in skirts--and empty-pocketed folks to whom a railroad journey might be a tragic necessity. A few years up and down the line, the constant study of the folk within his cars quickly taught him that. And it would have been a pretty poor sort of old-fashioned railroad that would not have allowed him discretion in such cases. Your new-time railroad allows him little or no discretion in matters of this sort. Your conductor of today, finally quite at ease in the trimness of his well-set uniform, his arm-lantern gone into the scrap heap in these days of electric-lighted cars, on most railroads has practically no opportunity to use his judgment in matters that pertain to the fares. If he lets anyone ride free on his train--and the boss learns of it--he hears dire threats about the Interstate Commerce Commission, sees the yawning doors of the penitentiary close at hand. Railroad managements have a way of using that law for the punishment of dishonest employees. So your conductor of today lacks the power of his brethren of an earlier day. They worked in a generation when the railroad still was a personal thing. Men and families owned railroads as they might own farms or banks or grocery stores. They headed their own roads and they assumed an attitude toward their men, autocratic or benevolent as the case might be, but almost always distinctly personal. The railroad as a separate unit had not then grown beyond a point where that was possible and the big boss was a real factor in the lives of his men. They might come to have a real affection for him--such as they had for Lucius Tuttle, when he was president of the Boston and Maine--and call him by his first name. No higher compliment can come up from the ranks to a railroad executive. Today discretion is discrimination in far too many cases. So reads the Interstate Commerce Law about discrimination. It places discrimination in the same class with burglary and the shippers who had dealings with many of our railroads a quarter of a century ago are thanking all the political gods of the United States of America that this law was placed upon the statute-books; but it can be read too literally, just as the conductor of a modern train can be too sharp-sighted. Here is a case, which from too fine or technical a reading of the law might be read into discrimination; in reality it was an instance of real discretion on the part of the conductor.