I cannot but feel when I realize the great annual total of wages which are being paid in the automobile and the war-munitions industries, to make striking instances, that the railroads are by no means receiving their fair share of the national wage account. Even the salaries paid to railroad executives, with the possible exception of a comparatively small group of men at the very top of some of the largest properties, are not generous. There has been much misstatement about these salaries. Because of these misstatements it is unfortunate, to say the least, that the railroads have not followed a policy of publishing their entire pay-rolls--from the president down to office boy. But the fact remains--a fact that may easily be verified by consulting the records of the Interstate Commerce Commission--that railroad salaries are not high, as compared with other lines of industry in America. That is one reason why the business has so few allurements to the educated young men--the coming engineers of America. They come trooping out of the high schools, the technical schools, the colleges, and the universities of our land and struggle to find their way into the electrical workshops, the mines, the steel-making industry, the automobile shops, the telephone, even to the new, scientific, highly developed forms of agriculture. Few of them find their way to the railroad. This is one of the most alarming symptoms of the great sick man of American business--his apparent utter inability to draw fresh, red blood to his veins.[6] A few of the roads--a very few indeed--have made distinct efforts to build up a personnel for future years by intelligent educational means. The Southern Pacific and the Union Pacific have made interesting studies and permanent efforts along these lines. But most of the railroads realize that it is the wage question--the long, hard road to a decent pay envelope in their service, as compared with the much shorter pathways in other lines of American industry--that is their chief obstacle in this phase of their railroad problem. It has been suggested, and with wisdom, that the railroad should begin to make a more careful study and analysis of its entire labor situation than it has ever before attempted. Today it is giving careful, scientific, detailed attention to every other phase of its great problems. One road today has twenty-seven scientific observers--well trained and schooled to their work--making a careful survey of its territory, with a view to developing its largest traffic possibilities. And some day a railroad is to begin making an audit of its labor--to discover for itself in exact fact and figures, the cost of living for a workman in Richmond or South Bend or Butte or San Bernardino. Upon that it will begin to plat its minimum wage-increase.