The remark was a distinct shock to the railroad executives, to put it mildly. Some of them were angered by it. The wiser ones, however, went home and sent their secretaries scurrying out after all the books on the then new science of efficiency that could be found. The more they studied efficiency the less these wise men were inclined to anger against Brandeis. Some of them found that they had been practicing efficiency on their properties for a long time past--only they had not known it by that name. They had been rebuilding whole divisions of their lines, relocating and reconstructing them so as to lower grades and iron out curves--all to the ultimate of a more economical operation of their roads. A bettered railroad means invariably a cheaper one to operate. The saving in grades and curves--no matter what may be the initial cost--means a more than proportionate saving in fuel cost, as well as in wear and tear upon the track and cars. Remember, if you will, that one of the biggest things that efficiency spells is economy. And economy is always a popular virtue in railroading, particularly among those gentlemen whose only interest in the railroads arises from the fact that they own them. If greater efficiency meant greater economy--well, perhaps it was just as well that that smart attorney from Boston made his remark at the rate hearing, only perhaps he might have phrased it in a little less violent fashion. That is why a man like Daniel Willard, the remarkably efficient president of the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad--the man who has done so much toward rehabilitating that one-time minstrel-show joke into one of the best railroad properties in the United States--spent days and nights reading every scrap about efficiency that could be brought to his attention, why he brought Harrington Emerson, one of the best-known of the efficiency experts into his own offices and staff, why, beginning with his great car and engine repair and construction shops, he is gradually extending the principles of modern scientific efficiency to every corner of the railroad which he heads. Willard's example has been followed by other railroad executives. And it is because of these and other efficiency principles that the best of our railroads have been enabled to crawl through the hard years of the past decade, without going into bankruptcy. * * * * * It is a gloomy record--these lean years in Egypt. They came succeeding a decade of apparent prosperity for most of the railroads. I say "apparent" advisedly. For, when you get well under the surface of things, you will find that even the first six or seven years of the present century were not genuinely prosperous for the overland carriers. Dip into statistics for a moment. They are dry and generally uninteresting things but nevertheless they are the straws which will show the way the wind is blowing. Look at these: