There is genuine feeling among many of the railroad companies of the land that the new competition is unjust. They make a good case for themselves. Complaints are coming in from the rail carriers all the way across the land. New York has appropriated and expended nearly $100,000,000 in building a system of improved highways over the entire state. Like the highways of California, they, too, are superb roads. Not only do they link all the big cities and the big towns but they sometimes stretch for many miles through the fastnesses of the forest--you may drive for twenty miles through the Adirondacks on as perfect a bit of pavement as any city park may boast and yet not pass more than one or two human habitations in all that distance. All of which is glorious for the motorist and his friends, to say nothing of the hotel keepers and the garage owners on the route. But how about the New York Central Railroad, which covers the greater part of New York State like a web and which, because of the fact that it is its chief taxpayer, becomes automatically the heaviest contributor to these highways? It knows that every mile of improved road that is completed is going to mean a lessening of its revenues from local passenger traffic. And it can have, from that point of view, small comfort from seeing the increasing list of motor-car owners in the New York State towns. For the moment leave the purely pleasure uses of the motor car. Consider a commercial possibility that is increasing almost overnight. The auditing departments of concerns that have from 50 to 500 salesmen out in the field are beginning to acquaint themselves with gasoline and tire performances. They soon will have need of such special knowledge. A single case will illustrate: Two drummers working out of Syracuse--the one for a typewriter concern and the other for a wholesale grocery--decided to cooperate. Together and out of their own funds they purchased an inexpensive car--had its body so adjusted that back of the driving seat there was a compartment large enough for a goodly quantity of samples and the valises that held their personal effects. They had figured that upon many of the local lines of railroad, operating but two or three trains a day in each direction at the most, they could not under the most favorable conditions "make" more than four towns a day. From twenty to thirty per cent of their time was spent in the lobbies of hotels or country stations waiting for the up local or the down. With their automobile they now can get out of a town as soon as their business is done there. And during the past three months they have averaged six towns a day.