If you are in that glorious company of self-appointed patriots who violently proclaim themselves at every possible opportunity "anti-railroad," you may be asking me now why so many of our roads have entered bankruptcy. You may be asking me if it is not due in some cases to bad location, and in others to inefficient or dishonest management. I shall reply to you by saying that perhaps fifty per cent of the railroads which are in bankruptcy today are there because they never should have been constructed in the first place and because of the financial management. The lack of judgment, ofttimes the sinister motives that brought them into being are now being paid for and paid for dearly. And in the second place, I will take no issue with you as to either carelessness or dishonesty in management of some of our railroads. "Why is it that every investigation of a railroad nowadays shows such a rotten condition throughout its affairs?" asked a distinguished economist at a dinner in Chicago last winter. E. P. Ripley, the veteran president of the Santa Fé, answered that question. "It is because a road is never investigated until it is morally certain that its affairs are rotten," said he, and then told how but one or two rotten apples would send their foul odors through an entire barrel and so seemingly contaminate its entire contents. Would you blacken a whole company because a few of its members have erred? Take another instance. A club for a while shelters a genuine blackleg. Are we to say that, because of this mere fact, its other members are not as good as any of us? So it is with the railroads. You cannot point even the finger of suspicion to such properties as the Santa Fé, the Burlington, the Pennsylvania, the North Western, or the Baltimore and Ohio railroads--to mention a few out of many, many instances. These are good roads; in some instances because they have been extraordinarily well located, but in most instances because of their continuous enlightened management. Yet some of them have been hard put to it of late to maintain their dividend obligations to their stockholders. And many roads have been compelled to lower or else suspend entirely the dividends paid in the years gone before. * * * * * "How about efficiency?" you may interject. You are not the first to ask that question. It was asked several years ago by a distinguished citizen of Boston--Louis D. Brandeis, now a justice of the Supreme Court at Washington. In the course of a rate hearing in which he appeared as counsel, Brandeis asked the question, then answered it himself. "I could save the railroads of the United States a million dollars a day, by applying the principles of modern efficiency to their operations," was his quiet answer to his own interrogation.