The last annual report of the Interstate Commerce Commission gives the aggregate capitalization of the railroads in the United States as over $13,000,000,000, showing that the railroad investment in our country is second in amount only to that in agriculture. It is estimated that the number of railroad stockholders today is over 400,000. We know that in 1907 over 1,600,000 men were employed on American railroads. Do you know of any good reason why this army of railroad men, together with the 400,000 stockholders, should not receive as fair consideration from government and people at large as the farmer and manufacturer receive? And yet the government in effect lets the one have money without interest to buy his land, and by means of a tariff makes you pay more for much that you buy, so that the other can pay his employes good wages. Personally I make no complaint because of either of these things; but so far as I can learn no one in Congress has suggested that railroads should raise their rates so that you might receive higher wages, and yet the two things, rates and wages, are very closely related. If anything I have said has helped you to a better understanding of the railroad problem, I am glad. If it has caused you to take a renewed or deeper interest in the subject, I am glad. I could go on and multiply cases in confirmation of what I have said had I the time, but what I have said already is perhaps sufficient. Do you intend to make railroading your life business? Are you interested in the prosperity of railroads, and particularly of the Burlington? Do you clearly see the relation between rates and wages? Do you think wages are too high? If not, perhaps you do not agree with one of your congressmen in Washington, who has just recently, on the floor of the house, urged that the Interstate Commerce Commission be given more power over rates, which means power to reduce them still more, because they have never, so far as I have heard, exercised their power over rates in any other way. Personally, I am glad I can claim to be a railroad man, and not only glad, but proud of it as well. I think the American railway is the one great institution above all others that Americans should be proud of. Mr. W. R. Lawson, an Englishman, who investigated our railroads in 1903, wrote upon his return, in his book on American Industrial Problems: "The science of transportation is going to be the special contribution of the American people to political economy."