Seated on the small of my back with my feet on the desk I sometimes think I am thinking, but when I get before an audience I am like the little steamer plying on the Sangamon River that had a 10-foot boiler and a 12-foot whistle--when she whistled she stopped. But my weakness, or rather one of my weaknesses, is susceptibility to flattery, and when one of your officers represented in honeyed phrase the importance of your organization and of this meeting, and laid particular stress upon the importance of my saying something, I weakly yielded. I know the result will be disappointment, but the responsibility is only partly mine, and you know we railroad men get so little flattery that when properly administered the result is intoxicating. Also, let me state in extenuation of the crime I am about to commit that the subject was not my own selection, but was chosen for me. My natural disposition in discussing railroads and the public is to growl, while, if I understand your officers' wishes, I am here expected to "purr." But while a better man might have been selected to say it, there is much to be said as to the railroads and public opinion. In this country the people rule--and in the long run that system, that method or that personality that does not meet the approbation of the public can not succeed. True, the public is often fooled; true, it "gets on the wrong feet," as often perhaps as on the right; true, it has to be guided, controlled, and at times abruptly stopped by those authorities which it has selected for that purpose; yet the fact remains that the government of the people, that Congress, the legislatures and even the courts are keenly alive to public sentiment and anxious not to stray far from the line of public opinion. Our forefathers recognized the danger that the majority would not necessarily be right, but might often be wrong, and sought to provide safeguards for the rights of the minority. But these safeguards are obviously growing less efficient; obviously growing weaker; obviously more sensitive to the public clamor which for the moment stands for public opinion, and when all safeguards have been exhausted it is to public opinion that we must look at last.