How about unorganized labor--the great groups of railroad workers who have no brotherhoods to look out for their rights or to further their interests? Has organized labor a monopoly of responsibility or of diplomacy? I think not. And if you will permit me, I shall try to show you an unorganized worker whose responsibility is quite as constant and as great as that of the men in the engine cab. This man is the one who makes the path for the locomotive safe--he is the track foreman, or section-boss. And the station agent, not of the metropolitan city but rather of the smaller cities or even the villages that multiplied many times make up the America that we all know, may yield nothing to the conductor in diplomacy. Of him, more in the next chapter. Consider first, if you will, the section-boss--the man who makes the steel highway safe for you and me each time we venture forth upon it. It is obvious that no amount of brains in the engine cab, no skill, no sagacity, no reserve force, is going to compensate for a neglected track. A single broken rail may send the best-driven locomotive in the world into the ditch beside the right of way, a mass of tangled and useless scrap iron. The section foreman knows this. And knowing it does not diminish his own sense of responsibility. * * * * * Sometimes when you sit in the observation end of the limited and look back idly upon the retreating landscape you will see him, shovel in hand, standing beside the track and glancing in a dazed fashion at a fast-flying luxury which he has never enjoyed. He seems, at first sight, to be a fairly inconsequential part in the manifold details of railroad operation. Yet it would be well if you could come a little closer to this important human factor in the comfort and the safety of your trip; could understand more fully the difficulties of his work. First you would have to understand that from the very hour the railroad is completed it requires constant and exacting care to keep it from quick deterioration. Continual strains of the traffic and the elements, seen and unseen, are wearing it out. Temperature, wind, moisture, friction, and chemical action are doing their best to tear down the nicety of the work of man in building the best of his pathways. The effects of temperature--of the wonderful range of heat and cold which the greater part of America experiences and sometimes within a remarkably short space of time--are to expand, contract, and ofttimes to break the rails; to sever telegraph lines, the maintenance of which is so vital to the safe conduct of the railroad; to disrupt the equally important signal service. A single flat-wheeled freight car went bumping up a railroad side line in Minnesota on a zero day a few winters ago and broke so many rails that it was necessary to tie up the entire line for twenty-four hours, until it could be made fit for operation once again.